High Anxiety: It’s election eve and the country has the jitters. 

  This is one of the most critical presidential votes in US history; four more years of crazy under Donald Trump vs. four years of pleasantly boring competence with Joe Biden.

  However they are voting, Americans are voting in big numbers. Early voting has already turned out 93,254,861 voters. That’s thirty percent more than the 58 million early votes cast in 2016, and nearly 70 percent of the national vote that year.

  In Texas, more early votes have been cast this year than the entire vote for that state in 2016. 

  Joe Biden and Kamala Harris plan to spend their entire day all over Pennsylvania shoring up a 4.3 percent lead in the polls there. Overall, Biden has an average 7.2 percent lead in the national polls, but what states he leads in is what will make the difference.

  Biden has a 3.2 percent lead in the top battleground states, according to Real Clear Politics. He leads by a hair in Florida, Ohio, and Iowa  and leads overall in the top battleground states by 3.2 percent.

  As for President Trump, The Washington Post reports that, “In a frenzied burst of campaigning in the last days of the presidential race, President Trump has accused doctors of fabricating coronavirus deaths for money, pantomimed a physical fight with Democratic rival Joe Biden, mocked a Fox News host for wearing a mask and celebrated his supporters for using pickup trucks to ambush a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway.”

Block That Vote:  The Republicans continue their fight not just against Joe Biden, but voting itself. The Texas Supreme Court yesterday denied a bid by Republicans to throw out more than 120,000 votes that had already been cast at drive-through locations in largely Democratic Harris County. A federal judge is expected to hear a last-minute appeal later today.

  The Trump campaign is continuing its fight to cut off vote counting tomorrow night, despite what may be millions of mail ballots waiting to be counted. He said yesterday he will fight to stop counting mail ballots that arrive at Pennsylvania election boards after tomorrow.

  “We should know the result of the election on Nov. 3, the evening of Nov. 3,” Trump said on Sunday, during a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, in which he repeated the lie that, “That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it should be.”

  No state reports final results on election night.  Cutting out mail votes would eliminate millions of votes by Democrats, who have voted early nearly 2-1 in states that take note of party affiliation. Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, carried on with the fiction that large scale voting fraud is not only possible, it’s likely. “If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe that President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral, somewhere in that range,” Miller said on ABC News. “And then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election.”

Lock and Load: A convoy of vehicles bearing Trump flags blocked traffic yesterday on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and jammed the Mario Cuomo Bridge between Tarrytown and Nyack, NY. 

 With political passions inflamed, police departments across the country are on guard for the possibility of general unpleasantness, voter intimidation, and even violence connected to the election.

  Michigan, for instance, one of the states where knuckleheads are allowed to openly carry guns, will have to find a way to keep them away from the polls. The Detroit police are prepping to stand by and rush to the polls if there’s violence. In Washington, DC, signs posted near the White House prohibit carry guns within 1,000 feet of a polling station. In Portland, Oregon, a right-wing group plans to be at ballot drop-off sites with guns in plain view. New York always posts one cop at every polling place, but backups will be ready.

  Both the lefties and righties are claiming the other side plans violence. What happens may depend up what President Trump says tomorrow night, win or lose. If it looks like he’s losing and he cries fraud, look out.

  Some prominent Republicans don’t feel bound by fact or caution when they  speak. Tom Fitton, President of the right wing Judicial Watch, tweeted that, “The Left is threatening and organizing Election Day violence across the nation. @RealDonaldTrump should plan now to invoke the Insurrection Act.”

The Obit Page. Few actors become immortal merely by saying their character’s name, but Sean Connery did it with “Bond … James Bond.” He died in his sleep over the weekend at age 90.

  Connery was a struggling young actor when he was cast as the coolest and sexiest secret agent who ever lived in the 1962 “Dr. No.” As Agent 007, Connery made seven of the Bond films.

  He acted for 70 years and won an Oscar in 1988 for his playing a Chicago cop opposite Kevin Costner in “The Untouchables.” His other films included The Hunt for Red October, Highlander, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. 

  Connery was Scottish to the bone and campaigned his whole life for Scottish independence from Great Britain.

Penciled Out: Tom Toles, a newspaper cartoonist for 50 years, the last 18 with The Washington Post, has published his last drawing for the paper. The cartoonist with political bite won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. Donald Trump and climate change have been big targets for him in recent years.

  In nine simple line drawings he says in his final cartoon, “I started out 50 years ago as a long-haired liberal and end a half-century later as a long-haired liberal.”

  He says, “Old cartoonists never die. They merely disappear into the eraser crumbs.” 

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