LIGHTNING ROUND: TALK TO THE FACE.

• I suspect Barack Obama's taunting of John McCain over the so-called controversies in Obama's mysterious past ("he wasn't willing to say it to my face") are likely to get under the Arizonan's skin. Joe Biden is getting into the act as well, telling supporters at a rally in Missouri that "In my neighborhood, when you’ve got something to say to a guy, you look him in the eye and you say it to him." I guess you can take the Biden out of Scranton, but you can't take the Scranton out of Biden.
• Realizing that a win in Florida would be the nail in McCain's coffin, Obama has dispatched his top two field generals to the Sunshine State to oversee GOTV efforts. See also Zach Exley's detailed piece on the organizational strategy of Obama's "neighborhood teams." One hopes this will offset some of the disturbing patterns of illegal voter purges in battleground states Adam commented on this morning.
• President Bush has begun coordinating with both the Obama and McCain campaigns on the upcoming presidential transition but, as Sam Stein reports, McCain's efforts are lagging considerably behind Obama's. Perhaps McCain has decided there isn't much of a reason for fruitless preparation at this point.
• Word on the street is that McCain might return to campaign in Iowa this weekend. Rick Davis claims this is because the campaign's internal polling shows a much tighter race than the polls describe.
• Even though I try to comment on non-presidential elections, I have to admit that the eleven gubernatorial races going on around the country were completely off my radar. Thankfully we have Larry Sabato, who goes into detail on each of them.
• Nate Silver latches onto Karl Rove's assertion that 2008 probably has "more undecided and persuadable voters open to switching their choice than in any election since 1968" and provides the historical data to demonstrate to Turd Blossom that, no, this simply isn't the case.
• David Petraeus affirms at a Heritage Foundation event that yes, sometimes you do need to talk to your enemies. Since I believe everything John McCain tells me about foreign policy, I have to conclude that Petraeus is both weak and naive in matters of foreign policy.
• Speaking of foreign policy experience, David Corn crunches the numbers and finds that Sarah Palin spent about 12 hours over her 19 months as governor in meetings with foreign officials. Corn doesn't say whether the records log the many hours Palin spent gazing at the Russian coastline, inferring Vladamir Putin's malicious intent.
• I'm not sure which provides the greater sense of schadenfreude, Hugh Hewitt's lame attempts to find a publisher for his book with the satire-proof title, "How Sarah Palin Won the Election... And Saved America," or this straight news story from Roll Call detailing the chaos that will befall the Republican Senate caucus if Mitch McConnell goes down in November.

--Mori Dinauer