This year’s costume is terrifying, as usual.

There are many good reasons for Americans to feel apathetic if not downright politically hostile going into next week’s election. Nearly ten percent of us are (officially) unemployed and those who aren’t are often stuck in nowhere jobs with no raises or promotions and no hope in the near future for anything better. Many of us have homes that are worth less than we paid for them and everybody’s hearing horrible stories every day about con men and fraud merchants stealing houses right out from under homeowners. And nothing ever seems to happen to any of the banksters and Masters of the Universe who caused all the problems in the first place. It’s hard to blame people for just wanting to withdraw into their personal lives and forget about politics.

But they should vote anyway, and here’s why. Voting isn’t just about making good things happen for yourself and your family. It’s about voting against things that will make your lives worse. And if this Republican party — at this point in history — wins big over the next two years, the lives of average Americans will definitely be worse.

Right now all that should matter to any of us is defeating the most radical, authoritarian, anti-intellectual Republican class in modern memory (and that’s saying something.) They were thoroughly repudiated at the polls in the last two elections and they haven’t learned a thing from those losses. Indeed, the lesson they took was that they hadn’t been aggressively wrong enough. Instead of seeing where they went wrong and making adjustments, they’ve doubled down on their worst policies and are prepared to go even further.

The rest.

Supporting free speech by encouraging his viewers to harass a cartoonist.

After this cartoon ran last week, I got a number of requests for shirts with the NMA logo. I am but your humble servant, so they are now available in the Cafe Press shop. In addition to, ah, single-handedly expressing your opposition to Christine O’Donnell, you can confound your Tea Partying neighbors with the ACORN world domination logo (from this cartoon last year); be really oblique with Invisible-Hand-of-the-Free-Market-Man logo shirts (and various other items); or just show your support for TMW with the brand new “Greetings From” design.

The menace of the Regulator!

The news from six months from now, maybe. (I didn’t want to feed the media narrative of an inevitable tea party sweep, which I think is overstated. This is a wacky “what if” cartoon, not a wacky “when definitely” cartoon.)

Also: couldn’t let Christine O’Donnell fade into irrelevancy without allowing myself at least one masturbation joke. I think my official cartoonist credentials would have been revoked.

Just learned that my new publisher, Soft Skull, is scaling back and shutting down their New York office. The new compilation is being printed as we speak, so it will still exist in the world — not sure what this means beyond that, except that the road ahead may be bumpy.

It’s been a great experience working with their production team, and my editor Denise Oswald, and I really hope everybody affected by this lands on their feet.

Also: I really don’t want this book to get lost in the shuffle. If you can afford the ten bucks, please consider pre-ordering it.

(Apologies for some real-time editing here as I gather my thoughts.)