Loyola Law School Professor Rick Hasen runs the best single blog for those who want to track the legal issues around the election. He flags a possibly illegal offer from Ben and Jerry's, which is offering a free scoop of ice cream on Election Day for anyone who votes:

The problem is that paying for turnout---even in a civic minded gesture such as this one---is illegal in elections in which federal candidates are on the ballot. I've written extensively about the issue. The only out I see for the ice cream company is that one need not prove one voted; it is enough to say "I voted." But if I were Ben and Jerry's lawyer, I'd tell them to shut this down.

Also, for those trying to track the rapid proliferation of election-related lawsuits as we approach Nov. 4, take a look at the election law blog maintained by Moritz Law School.

There is now a pattern emerging from the McCain campaign and its surrogates. Instead of trying to persuade Americans who aren't in their camp (the sign of a campaign that thinks it can win), they are trying to de-legitimize them (the sign of a campaign that thinks it can't).

That's what you hear in Sarah Palin's disquisition in Greensboro, N.C., on "these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation." (So what does that say about the rest of the country?) That is what you hear in Nancy Pfotenauer's suggestion that there's a difference between Northern Virginia and "real Virginia." It is what you hear in Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann's crazypants rant about--well, I really don't know what. And it is what you hear in a robocall strategy that is as ridiculous as it is cowardly. (On that score, Republican Sen. Susan Collins deserves credit for calling for a stop to it in her state.)

On the other hand, here's what you do when you think you are winning, and you are looking at the challenges of governing at the end of a divisive campaign:

UPDATE: I give up. Ambinder said what I said, only way funnier.

UPDATE2: This from Sunday's Minnespolis Star-Tribune:

A spokesman for DFLer Elwyn Tinklenberg's congressional campaign said a "fire" had been lit after his opponent criticized Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

John Wodele said Saturday night that 9,000 people nationwide have donated roughly $450,000 in the 24 hours since Rep. Michele Bachmann told Chris Matthews of MSNBC that Obama "may have anti-American views."

Suggesting that the most populous area of a state you ostensibly are trying to win isn't really part of that state:

One of the ways I got to know John McCain a decade or so ago was through a mutual friend—a fellow by the name of David Ifshin. I knew David through Democratic Party politics. He was a stalwart moderate, a member of the Democratic Leadership Council and an occasional adviser to Bill Clinton. Our wives were, and are, close friends. But McCain’s relationship with David was far more interesting.

Ifshin, you see, had been a vehement anti-Vietnam radical. He had even gone to Hanoi at the height at the war and given a speech denouncing the American pilots dropping bombs on North Vietnamese civilians as “war criminals.” The speech was broadcast repeatedly in the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain was being held captive. More than a few people thought Ifshin was guilty of treason.
After McCain was tortured and broken by the North Vietnamese and signed a confession of “criminality,” he was so ashamed that he attempted suicide—and later made a vow that he wouldn’t question the decisions or statements made by anybody else about the war. And so, when he arrived in the U.S. after his released and was asked about the antiwar protesters by Life magazine, he refused to condemn them. He kept to this policy, more or less, until 1984 when, as an ambitious young politician, he was asked by the Reagan campaign to deliver a speech slamming one of Walter Mondale’s top advisors—his campaign counsel, David Ifshin—for going to Hanoi, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy during wartime..
McCain gave the speech but, he later told me, felt great remorse about it. “I didn’t know the guy. I’d never met him,” he told me.
McCain and Ifshin met the following year at the annual AIPAC convention in Washington—and there is some disagreement what happened next: Both men later told me that the other initiated the conversation by apologizing. “McCain said, ‘I’m sorry I gave that speech. I didn’t even know you’” Ifshin told me. “And I said to him, ‘You’re apologizing to me?’ I’ve been wanting to apologize to you for years. I feel so terrible about that speech I gave in Hanoi.”
The two became fast friends. They did charitable work together in Vietnam and elsewhere. When Bill Clinton went to the Vietnam Memorial for Memorial Day 1993, both Ifshin and McCain were there, too. And when McCain saw a sign in the crowd—“Clinton: Tell Us About Ifshin”—McCain went to the floor of the Senate the next day and said, “Let me tell you about David Ifshin…David is a friend of mine.”
And when David was diagnosed with cancer, John McCain was there for him. And when David died, McCain gave one of the eulogies at his funeral. His voice broke when he said, “David taught me a lot about the meaning of courage.”

I’ve told this story many times, especially to veterans groups, because it says so much about the importance of forgiveness, of reconciliation. But, in the heat of the campaign, I’d forgotten about it…until the past weeks, when Obama’s passing relationship with the radical Bill Ayers—not nearly as close as McCain’s friendship with David Ifshin—became news, and has been relentlessly exploited by John McCain and his campaign, most recently in robo-calls that flagrantly distort the nature of Obama’s relationship with Ayers.
If you want to know why I—like so many others--held John McCain in such high regard for so long, it had a lot to do with David Ifshin. And if you want to know why my opinion of him has plummeted, it has something to do with William Ayers.

It Gets Worse: McCain accuses Obama of socialism, even though his own health care tax credit is refundable--and therefore a distribution of wealth downward...Of course, McCain has been on the record for months--years, actually--in favor of redistributing wealth...upward, toward the wealthy, on the theory that it will "trickle down."

I was saddened this morning to see this obituary in the New York Times for George Keller, the former chairman of Chevron, who died at age 84 of complications from surgery. Way, way back when I was 25 years old and starting out with the Los Angeles Times business section, the paper assigned me to cover the oil beat, which meant I was dealing every day with companies that were notoriously hostile to the media. With most of them, I would count myself lucky if I could get the PR office to return my call.

But it was my great good fortune that one of the big, bad "seven sisters" of the industry was being run by a man who took a very different approach. A few years before I arrived on the beat, Keller had issued the order that there was to be no more "no comment" from Standard Oil of California. This kind of openness was a real culture shock to the company, and to the industry. Most remarkably, that order went right up to the top. I quickly discovered that the chairman himself was one of the most engaging, accessible, informative--and truthful--sources a reporter could have, whether the subject was drilling off the coast of California or the complexities of doing business in the Middle East. In 1984, Keller pulled off what was then the biggest merger ever, buying Gulf Oil--a company larger than Socal--for an astounding figure of $13.3 billion.

I always suspected that one reason he was so patient with my questions was the fact that he had a son who was also starting out in the news business. Often, at the end of our interviews, he would tell me with a father's pride about the latest story that Bill Keller had written for the Dallas Times-Herald. (Bill, it turned out, did okay for himself in this business. He got hired by the New York Times, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the breakup of the Soviet Union and now is the paper's executive editor.) I'd like to offer my condolences to the Keller family, and also my gratitude to George Keller.