Something tells me the John McCain Cabbage Patch kid will be heavily discounted after tonight, but Palin will be hot for a while longer.

Obama, of course, will be on every kid’s Christmas list this year.

Nate Silver has your hour-by-hour guide to election night.

McCain’s holding his big election night party at a swanky resort built in 1929 during the Hoover administration.  How… fitting?  And also a perfect example of the disastrous campaign decisions he’s made.

Ross Douthat, on why McCain’s campaign advisors actually are to blame for McCain’s (predicted) loss this year, and not just the victims of an inevitable Democratic landslide:

Maybe I should insert a caveat here, something along the lines of “if McCain wins on Tuesday, Schmidt and Co. are geniuses after all.” But the only way McCain wins, so far as I can tell, is if Russia invades Western Europe on Monday, or if the America that shows up to vote next week looks and votes not at all like the America that’s been showing up in polls and surveys and every other indicator that political professionals have to work with. Maybe it will: Maybe there are unmappable effects at work in this race, and maybe after Tuesday the entire polling industry will have to close up shop in disgrace. But the job of a campaign is to put their candidate in a position to win with the electorate as it’s possible to understand it, not with some hypothetical electorate that might emerge to save you from the fate that all the indicators predicted. Rove succeeded at that task; the McCain campaign appears to have failed. Which means that if they win on Tuesday, it won’t be because they were better than we thought they were, but because they were luckier – luckier than we thought, and luckier, as well, than basically every Presidential campaign in the modern history of America.

I think this is right.  Remember in the Democratic primary when it truly looked like whoever we chose–Hillary or Barack–the race would be really, really close?  Remember the fear we felt when the GOP actually did pick McCain–the candidate all on the left recognized as the only one who could beat us in a Dem-friendly year with an amazing Democratic candidate–instead of the more likely Huckabee or Giuliani or Romney?  This was not Obama’s race to lose all along.  There was a good case to be made against “liberal elitism”  and on the basis of all the good will McCain had built up with the electorate over the years.  But McCain and his advisors did not make this case.

It’s possible, of course, that their biggest problem was an inability to make any case consistently; that McCain’s fighter-pilot temperment predisposes him to move in such erratic ways. (Try this! This didn’t work.  Try that! That didn’t work. Try the other thing!  And so on.)  It’s surely a failing of the campaign staff if he is allowed to act in ways that clearly send him off message.  But it’s the candidate’s job to hire people who can protect him from himself.  It all comes down to the leadership decisions of the man in charge.  And McCain made the wrong ones.  His (predicted) loss was never inevitable.  He simply did not run a good campaign.

Ana Marie Cox reports:

After first boasting that he wanted to “beef up” Sen. Barack Obama’s “skinny legs,” perhaps by “doing some squats,” he opined that McCain had been in a Vietnam camp for longer than Obama has been in the Senate.*

This is, of course, true, but one imagines that the various tenures make use of vastly different skill sets. If, however, we elect Obama and then the country enters into some sort of dystopian nightmare scenario in which even the president is threatened with daily torture and solitary confinement, well, then, I guess we’ll all be sorry, won’t we? Then again, I sort of imagine that scenario to be more likely under a McCain administration, so it’s kind of a chicken-and-egg thing.

The McCain campaign is giving away McCain buttons on Facebook:

Everything you might have missed (or want to relive) between the first and last debates:

TaxVox, commenting on the idea that Obama’s tax policies would be redistributive, while McCain’s wouldn’t be:

… [If] McCain favors a flat tax, he should tell us and explain why he thinks it is a good idea to redistribute income by raising taxes on the middle class and giving the money to the wealthy.

The argument would be something along typical supply-side lines, with a nod toward the efficiency of a very simple tax code (something everyone would love, but that is possible even with non-flat taxes).  Most voters probably agree at this point that giving the wealthy free reign to work their magic, then sitting back and waiting for the profits to trickle down to the rest of us, is not very effective.

Ana Marie Cox notes how many musicians/songwriters have asked/demanded that McCain stop using their music.  Soon he’ll have to sing his own tune as he walks out on stage.

Ed Kilgore on McCain, Obama, SCOTUS, and the idea that the GOP could win by talking about activist judges again:

Seven of the current nine Justices were appointed by Republican presidents.

Going back a while, 12 of the last 14 Supreme Court appointments were made by Republican presidents (two by Bush 43, two by Bush 41, three by Reagan, one by Ford, four by Nixon, as opposed to two by Clinton and zero for poor Jimmy Carter).

When it comes to abortion, five of the seven Justices who concurred in the original Roe v. Wade decision striking down state abortion laws were appointed by Republican presidents. All five of the Justices who voted to reaffirm Roe in the crucial Casey decision of 1992 were appointed by Republican presidents.

In terms of future appointments, it is universally believed that the three Justices most likely to retire during the next four years are Stevens, Ginsburg, and Souter. They are three of the five current Court members who are willing to uphold Roe (including Justice Kennedy, who’s recently exhibited a willingness to support major restrictions on abortion rights), and three of the four Justices generally thought to constitute the Court’s “liberal wing,” though none of them are really “liberal activists” in the tradition of past figures like Douglas, Brennan or Warren.

So: the idea that Barack Obama would be in a position to engage in any “social engineering” via the Supreme Court is, well, preposterous. The real issue here, as every honest conservative will admit, is that a President McCain could finally consolidate a conservative activist revolution on the Court that’s been a work in progress since the 1970s, and that is focused obsessively on the overturning of Roe. And it’s extremely clear that conservatives will demand, and will receive, an appointment from a President McCain that would represent the fifth vote to overturn Roe, in addition to a variety of other big constitutional changes from today’s center-right Court.