The final debate between Sen. Barack Obama and John McCain begins in less than two hours.

What will McCain do? Will he stay on issues or make a last minute sleaze attack on Obama?

How will Obama respond? How should he respond?

We'll all be here to live-blog the debate -- Big Tent Democrat, TChris, the TL Kid and me -- hope you will join us.

In the meantime, here's a place for your last minute debate thoughts.

The McCain campaign hasn't given up on Wisconsin, but the Republican National Committee can read the poll numbers and believes its resources can best be spent elsewhere. The RNC is dropping its Wisconsin advertising to focus on holding onto states that voted for Bush four years ago.

Fortunately, with the use of answering machines and caller ID, it's possible for Wisconsinites to avoid the McCain campaign's obnoxious robocalls. I listened to about 5 seconds of a robotic attack upon Barack Obama's "Hollywood values" yesterday before pressing the delete button. If McCain's plan is to annoy voters into supporting him, it isn't working.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold called on McCain to work harder to stop the decline of his campaign into "something hateful and dangerous."

Stocks fell again today as recession fear set in.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 700 points, giving back nearly all its record gain from Monday.

The Dow closed down 7.9 percent, or 733 points, at 8,578. That follows a loss of 77 points yesterday, which nearly wipes out Monday's 936-point gain. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index was off 9 percent, with a 90-point decline, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq was down 8.5 percent, losing 151 points.

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A federal law that "prohibits the use of public funds or resources for partisan political activities" didn't stop Bush administration officials from traveling around the country in 2006 to "to lend prestige or bring federal grants to 99 politically endangered Republicans that year."

[A] draft report released by the Democratic majority of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform ... said the trips were freely described as political in subpoenaed e-mails and interviews. A master list prepared at the White House two weeks before the election listed the names and dates of appearances by cabinet secretaries in 73 key congressional districts, all under the heading "Final Push Surrogate Matrix."

"This is," the report said, "a gross abuse of the public trust."

Granted, there is often an ambiguous line between politics and policy, and it isn't unusual for presidents to use their office to help members of their political party. The report concludes that the Bush administration's approach was markedly different from that of previous White House occupants. [more ...]

As Big Tent Demcocrat noted earlier today, uneasy about the blessing it received from the Justice Department to engage in torture, senior CIA officials wanted express White House approval as political cover for its aggressive (and illegal) interrogation techniques.

The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said.

The Washington Post reports that the administration finally issued memoranda in 2003 and 2004 "that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects." The classified memos have not been previously disclosed.

The New York Times reports that drug courts have been a successful experiment. They reduce prison populations and recidivism by substituting treatment and supervision for incarceration in prosecutions of drug offenders.

Experts say drug courts have been the country’s fastest-spreading innovation in criminal justice, giving arrested addicts a chance to avoid prison by agreeing to stringent oversight and addiction treatment. Recent studies show drug courts are one of the few initiatives that reduce recidivism — on average by 8 percent to 10 percent nationally and as high as 26 percent in New York State — and save taxpayer money.

Although there are about 2,100 drug court programs providing treatment at any given time to about 70,000 offenders, that number represents a small percentage of the addicts who are charged with drug crimes. Drug courts have high up-front costs, but they save money in the long term by keeping offenders out of prison and by reducing crime. We need more of them. [more ...]

In the Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford) movie "Clear And Present Danger," the CIA Director of Operations Robert Ritter pulls out a letter of authorization from the White House for an illegal action and exclaims to Jack Ryan:

Ritter: I have an *autographed get-out-of-jail-free card*! "The President of the United States authorizes Deputy Director of the CIA Robert Ritter to conduct 'Operation Reciprocity' including all necessary funding and support. This action is deemed important to the national security of the United States etcetera, etcetera, etcetera." You don't have one of these, do you Jack?

George Tenet asked for and got a get out of jail free card from the Bush White House on torture:

The problem the Right Wing is having with Barack Obama is that he has lived in too many different places. With Bill Clinton it was easy - "The Arkansas Project" was just waiting to happen. But putting together The Obama Chronicles (see The Clinton Chronicles) is not so easy. (To be fair, we have certainly seen a version of the "Sarah Palin Chronicles" (not to be confused with the Sarah Connor Chronicles) from the Left blogs). Notwithstanding, as Kevin Drum gathers for us, the beginnings of the makings of "The Barack Obama Chronicles" is in the works:

One: Bill Ayers really wrote Obama's book, Dreams From My Father. Two: Obama had an underage, gay affair with a pedophile. Three: It's entirely possible that Obama was involved with bombing the South African rugby team while he was at Columbia in the 80s. Four: Obama, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright (via a chain of associations too Rube Goldbergesque to summarize) were engaged in a conspiracy to teach Pan-African "cultural nationalism" to Chicago schoolkids during the 90s. Five: Obama was having an affair with one of his fundraiser babes in 2004 until Michelle found out and banished the woman to a "little Caribbean island."

They're coming . . .

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Yesterday, Sarah Palin said:

Our opponents spend so much time pretending they are running against the current president. I think it's wearing pretty thin . . . The American people are really waking up and saying no, the status quo is not one of the boxes to check.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, today's look at the polls. DKos/R2000 has Obama up 11, 52-41. NYT/CBS has Obama up 14, 53-39. Battleground has Obama up 13, 53-40. The LATimes has Obama up 9, 50-41. Gallup (NVModel) has Obama up 10, 53-43. Ipsos/McClatchey has it 51-42 Obama. McCain's "good news" comes from Zogby, which has McCain down 4 and IBD/TIPP, which has McCain down 3. There are some polls that have Obama's lead in the 5-7 point range. There is no good news at all for McCain in the state polling where he basically trails every where remotely competitive and is in tossup races now in West Virginia, Indiana and Arkansas.

The Presidential race is over and after tonight's debate - the focus should shift to the Congressional races and what a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President need to do to get the country moving in the right direction. The correct answer is we need a new New Deal.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Remember when the McCain campaign told us that the candidate didn't speak for the campaign? Does he ever?

The campaign zigs, McCain zags. The campaign initiates a full throttle attack on Obama's association with Bill Ayers, and McCain ignores Ayers in two dull debates. Then, taking note of polls showing that the negative campaigning has backfired, the campaign gropes for a change of strategy by trying to find a way to make McCain look credible on the economy. And so McCain decides that the last debate is the perfect time to talk about Ayers.

Why would McCain attack Obama in front of a national audience when he knows it will drive away voters? [more ...]

Remember Fred Baron, the financier in the midst of the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter story?

He was diagnosed last week with multiple myeloma and given a week to live. There's a drug, Tsyabri, that's an exact match for him and the FDA has okayed it and requests have been made by Lance Armstrong, Bill Clinton, John Kerry and others to provide it and the CEO of Biotech is refusing.

Read his son's letter (Andrew is the founder of Rocketboom)and do what you can to add to the pressure. The drug is readily available, it's just not prescribed for myeloma.

This was not meant to be the indictment of the Senate that it seems to be:

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch called Sen. Ted Stevens ... one of the Senate's greatest minds during testimony at the Alaska senator's corruption trial.

You'll recall that Stevens is the genius who said this:

"I just the other day got -- an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially... And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes."