Lindsay Beyerstein

Barack Obama and John McCain will face off in Long Island tonight in the final debate before the presidential election. McCain has one last chance to reestablish himself as a viable candidate and reverse his steady decline in the polls. In the spirit of bipartisanship, The Jed Report has produced a helpful debate prep video for John McCain.

Sarah Palin replaced Alaska’s public safety commissioner with a man she knew had been accused of sexually harassing an employee.

An independent investigator concluded last week that Palin abused her power as governor by orchestrating a pressure campaign to fire her ex brother-in-law, state trooper Mark Wooten. Palin allegedly fired Alaska’s esteemed public safety commissione, Walt Monegan, because Monegan refused to fire Wooten.

Sarah Palin gets speech ideas from her Starbucks mocha cups. Last week Palin learned, via Madeline Albright, via Starbucks, that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women. Actually, the original quote was about women who don’t help other women, but nevermind.

Nice suit, Norm!

Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota allegedly accepted at least one Nieman Marcus shopping spree from GOP patron Nasser Kazeminy.

The Denver police union is selling t-shirts DNC commemorative t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “We Get Up Early to Beat the Crowds.”

The Obama camp is reportedly looking for a rape survivor who was billed for her rape kit to appear in an ad. As Mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin signed off on a budget that cut off city funds for rape exams, forcing many women to pay out of pocket.

Megan at Jezebel thinks it’s disturbing that the campaign would ask a survivor to come to them. It strikes her as importantly different to have a victim volunteer, as opposed to having the campaign put out a call.

WaPo media critic Howie Kurtz says some journalists admit they’re self-censoring their coverage of Republican vice presidential nominee’s flailing incompetence, lest they be perceived as “piling on”.

“Is organic agriculture polluting our food with heavy metals,” asks James E. McWilliams in Slate. I suppose anything is possible, but McWilliams’ article doesn’t give us much reason to worry.

Vintage McCain. Having returned to DC to “help” with the financial crisis, McCain acts decisively to provoke shouting bitterness recrimination and confusion at the bailout negotiations, without first bothering to read the plan he was shouting about, or the one he was attacking.

Several hundred protesters rallied against Bush’s proposed bailout in Manhattan’s financial district today. Protesters heaped their old magazines, vacuum cleaner hoses, knickknacks and other distressed assets under the back end of the iconic Wall Street Bull statue and offered to sell them to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

The motto of the day was, “Buy my shitpile,” likely an allusion to Atrios’s famous nickname for the subprime mortgage debacle.