We’re five days out from Election Day and candidates are rolling out their last-minute appeals to voters. To mark the close of this wild election season, Salon rounded up the best of the worst political ads this season and awarded folks for their best race-baiting ads. Salon called them the Baitys.

The piece is a sad trip down memory lane in an election season that’s been full of demagoguery and racially charged attacks. John McCain wins one, for his memorable "Complete the Danged Fence" ad. Surprise, surprise, Sharron Angle took home three awards for three separate commercials she has attacking immigrants. (Oh, and Harry Reid along with them.) Salon includes the "Don’t Vote" ad produced by Republican political strategist Robert de Posada encouraging Latino voters, who often vote Democrat, to stay home next week.

And then there’s the slick, truly bizarre and mind-bending (for this Chinese-American blogger at least) political ad for the conservative group Citizens Against Government Waste. It features a Chinese man "in 2030 A.D." giving a lecture entirely in Chinese to impressionable young Asian students about the pitfalls of great empires. America’s came when the country tried to "spend and tax its way out of a great recession" and institute health care reform. The ad ends with the Chinese professor cackling because Americans now "work for us"–the Chinese.

This is the first year Salon‘s handing out its awards for, as they call it, "Excellence in the Field of Race-baiting." But something tells us it won’t be the last.