Week of October 21, 2004

• Ten: Rep. Jim DeMint, Inez Tenenbaum's opponent for South Carolina's Senate seat, opposes allowing gay Americans to teach in public schools. He also said he opposes allowing single pregnant women to teach because they too make bad "moral decisions" and are therefore bad "role models" for children.
• Nine: DeMint thinks it's a good idea to put even more of the nation's tax burden on the poor by abolishing the IRS and instituting a whopping 23% sales tax on all goods and services.
• Eight: He opposes a woman's right to choose and criticizes Inez for her EMILY's List endorsement and her record of defending reproductive rights.
• Seven: Inez Tenenbaum has a track record of tremendous success as South Carolina's superintendent of education but to help DeMint, Republicans are relentlessly attacking her with ads so false and outrageous that some television stations have pulled them off the air!
  
• Six: Mel Martinez, running neck-and-neck with Betty Castor for Florida's Senate seat, has promised to "vote for Bush's conservative policies every chance I get."
• Five: Martinez has levied absurd attacks on Castor, criticizing her for the support she's gotten from EMILY's List members and calling her soft on terrorism. At a recent rally in St. Petersburg, Martinez said, "If Betty Castor had her way, Saddam Hussein would still be butchering the people of Iraq and enslaving his own people and creating problems in the Middle East."
• Four: Despite Martinez's attacks, Castor is running her own smart campaign based on a real record of achievement on issues that truly matter to Floridians, including health care and education.
  
• Three: If women voters don't go to the polls in record numbers to provide the winning margin for John Kerry and other Democrats in key races, George W. Bush will have four more years and a supportive Congress to fully implement his disastrous right-wing agenda.
• Two: If we don't do everything within our power to change the face of government, Bush will almost certainly have the opportunity to appoint as many as three new Supreme Court Justices who share the same extreme views as Clarence Thomas, who Bush has called his model justice!
• One: From now until polls close on November 2, EMILY's List is running a massive get-out-the-vote effort to tell key women and independent voters what's at stake in this election in Florida and elsewhere.