the week before the elections

only in america ... a snippet from today's times from an article about last-minute republican campaigning for next week's mid-term elections:

"In one electoral district in Texas, the last-minute campaign strategy has been to play down the fact that a candidate is dead.

Glenda Dawson, a Republican congresswoman in Pearland, died in September but a campaign leaflet distributed this week shows her smiling and noting her achievements for the district and did not mention her passing.

Ms Dawson is expected to win the reliably Republican district, in which case a special election will be held in a few months time. State Representative Dennis Bonnen, who is running her campaign, denied deliberately obscuring her death.

"We don’t suggest that there’s a great thing she’s going to accomplish for the voters in the future," he said. "We had already made it clear to voters in one piece that she had passed away. We didn’t think it was necessarily necessary to repeat it.""

it's incredible, isn't it, that dead people are even allowed to run. *pause while we insert appropriate joke about currently serving politicians and how dead they may be* but then better dead than red, eh? or than rainbow or black or anything else.