Polling wiz Nate Silver reports that Obama has a 5.8-point lead in the national popular vote. McCain is trailing in Pennsylvania, despite a massive last-minute campaign onslaught.

Virtually every winning scenario for McCain presupposes that the polls are flat-out wrong, whether because of the Bradley effect, voter suppression, electronic voter fraud, or the most massive statistical fluke in the history of quantitation.

Image courtesy of Howie Klein by email.

Keith Olbermann offers a little friendly advice to John McCain on how this whole “guilt by association” thing works: Do not play up your opponent’s “guilt” when you are more closely linked to the allegedly guiltifying person than he is.

Tactics aside, the McCain campaign’s insinuations that Khalidi is an anti-Semitic are slanderous, loony, and downright racist. Rashid Khalidi is an excellent American, the sort of person anyone would be proud to have as a friend. He’s an esteemed scholar, a beloved teacher, a champion of human rights, and a regular commenter on Mid East issues for prestigious national media outlets. Khalidi’s books have gotten rave reviews in the New York Times from such wild-eyed rabble rousers as Tom Friedman and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Hey you kids, get off my lawn, OR ELSE! Kenneth Rowles, 50, was charged with assault after allegedly opening fire on two neighborhood teenagers whom he claims were vandalizing his John McCain lawn sign:

Elaine Lafferty, formerly the editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine, now a McCain campaign consultant, asserts that Sarah Palin is super-smart:

Professor Deana Pollard Sacks snapped this picture with her cellphone at at the corner of Fries Road and Inverness Park Way in Houston, TX.

The McCain/Palin sign features a fetus waving an American flag overtop of the word LIFE. It doesn’t look like official McMerch, but it’s no joke.

The hoaxster who scratched a “B” into her own cheek and claimed that a fictional black Obama-supporting thug did it now blames the media for blowing her politically-motivated hate crime into a political firestorm: “She just opened up and said she wanted to tell the truth,” Bryant said, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “She was upset with the media for blowing this into a political firestorm.”

The executive vice president of Fox News predicted that if Ashley Todd’s claims of mutilation at the hands of a black man turned out to be a hoax, the McCain campaign would be toast:

Breaking on KDKA Channel 02: “A Pittsburgh police commander says a volunteer for the McCain campaign who reported being robbed and attacked near a bank ATM in Bloomfield has confessed to making up the story. Police say charges will be filed.”

Here’s the Drudge Headline, which was in 72-point font before it got bumped for a story about Bloomberg’s term limits: SHOCK: MCCAIN VOLUNTEER ATTACKED AND MUTILATED IN PITTSBURGH…’B’ CARVED INTO 20-YEAR OLD WOMAN’S FACE… DEVELOPING…

Here’s the Pittsburgh Post Gazette story that Drudge is construing as a politically-motivated crime. A 20-year-old McCain staffer was brutally mugged outside a bank: