San Francisco

Photo: DH

California Academy of Science

Miette

Photo: DH
Chocolate Tomboy at Dolores Park

Thank you Cliff, Adam, Sofi, James, Marilyn, Antonio, Sascha, and Charlie

Obama

Washington Post/ABC Poll Results

More voters trust Obama to deal with the economy, and he currently has a big edge as the candidate who is more in tune with the economic problems Americans now face. He also has a double-digit advantage on handling the current problems on Wall Street, and as a result, there has been a rise in his overall support. The poll found that, among likely voters, Obama now leads McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. Two weeks ago, in the days immediately following the Republican National Convention, the race was essentially even, with McCain at 49 percent and Obama at 47 percent.

http://tiny.cc/LQpZV

San Francisco

Photo: Tim Griffith

California Academy of Sciences

NYTimes:
"Designed by [Renzo] Piano on the site of the academy’s demolished home, the building has a steel frame that rests amid the verdant flora like a delicate piece of fine embroidery. Capped by a stupendous floating green roof of undulating mounds of plants, it embodies the academy’s philosophy that humanity is only one part of an endlessly complex universal system.

"Mr. Piano’s building is also a blazingly uncynical embrace of the Enlightenment values of truth and reason. Its Classical symmetry — the axial geometry, the columns framing a central entry — taps into a lineage that runs back to Mies van der Rohe’s 1968 Neue Nationalgalerie and Schinkel’s 1828 Altes Museum in Berlin and even further, to the Parthenon."

de Brunhoff

Morgan Library & Museum

A Laurent de Brunhoff drawing of Babar and Arthur in the Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition, "Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors."

Taos, New Mexico

Photo: Jim Greenberg
Greenberg's Garden

Central Afghanistan

Photo: Moises Saman for The New York Times

Morandi

Giorgio Morandi, SIAE/Museo D’Arte Moderna E Contemporanea Di Trento E Rovereto

NYTimes: The still life, above, from 1954 is on view in the artist’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Daniel Radcliffe

Photo: Daniel Martinez
The actor at the Gielgud Theatre, London. He will appear in a revival of “Equus,” opening Sept. 25, at the Broadhurst in New York City.
(Thanks to anonymous for the correction.)

Hebron

Photo: Hazem Bader/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israeli soldiers stopped a Palestinian youth as they patrolled near the Jewish settlements of Beit Romano and Abraham Avino in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.

On the economy

Reuters/Rick Wilking
Sen. Barack Obama speaks in Golden, Colo., Sept. 16, 2008.
From Salon:

Launching punches against John McCain as hard as any he has yet delivered, while laying out a clear explanation of what his plans for a "21st century regulatory system" entail, Barack Obama gave his most forceful speech on the economy so far in this campaign, Tuesday morning in Golden, Colo.

He picked a good time to do it. With Wall Street in turmoil, major financial institutions declaring bankruptcy or being swallowed up by their competitors, unemployment rising, consumer spending falling -- and one day after the sharpest drop in the U.S. stock market since Sept. 11 -- the state of the economy is on the front burner as never before in this presidential campaign.

The key sentence:

So let's be clear: what we've seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed.

When Obama refers to an economic philosophy that has "failed," this is what he is talking about: The theory that markets are perfectly self-correcting, that the best government is the government that lets the rich do as they please, and prosperity will trickle down to everyone else, has taken an enormous body blow.

http://tinyurl.com/18r

"Today of all days, John McCain's stubborn insistence that the 'fundamentals of the economy are strong' shows that he is disturbingly out of touch with what's going in the lives of ordinary Americans. Even as his own ads try to convince him that the economy is in crisis, apparently his 26 years in Washington have left him incapable of understanding that the policies he supports have created an historic economic crisis," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

"This morning we woke up to some very serious and troubling news from Wall Street.

"The situation with Lehman Brothers and other financial institutions is the latest in a wave of crises that are generating enormous uncertainty about the future of our financial markets. This turmoil is a major threat to our economy and its ability to create good-paying jobs and help working Americans pay their bills, save for their future, and make their mortgage payments.

"The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren’t minding the store. Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.

"I certainly don’t fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. It’s a philosophy we’ve had for the last eight years – one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. It’s a philosophy that says even common-sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises.

"Well now, instead of prosperity trickling down, the pain has trickled up – from the struggles of hardworking Americans on Main Street to the largest firms of Wall Street.

"This country can’t afford another four years of this failed philosophy. For years, I have consistently called for modernizing the rules of the road to suit a 21st century market – rules that would protect American investors and consumers. And I’ve called for policies that grow our economy and our middle-class together. That is the change I am calling for in this campaign, and that is the change I will bring as President."

Jeremy Gerard

Clueless Palin Peddles Cliches Under Gibson's Glare
Commentary by Jeremy Gerard, editor for Bloomberg News.

Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The question of experience came up again last night: Was the man of the moment prepared for the difficult task at hand? Did he have the chops?

ABC News anchor Charles Gibson got the get, the first mano- a-womano sit down with the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin. He had the chops.

Palin may not have blinked when John McCain asked her to be his running mate. Last night, however, found her frozen in the Klieg lights as the dogged interlocutor set his sights on his visitor.

Peering down at Palin through reading glasses set at the tip of his nose, foot circling over knee ever more impatiently, Gibson, 65, wouldn't let her coast. Yes, she had mastered the pronunciation of Georgia president Mikhail Saakashvili's name, not to mention that of Iran's Mahmud Ahmadinejad. And maybe that would have been good enough on ``Good Morning America.''

But no-one had coached her in something called the Bush Doctrine. Doctrine? What doctrine would that be, Charlie? Palin, 44, apparently never heard of the Bush Doctrine until yesterday. She flashed a smile nearly as frozen as her running- mate's and did that tenth-grader thing of tap-dancing around the question, skittishly ad libbing her way with gibberish about Bush's ``global vision.''

Gibson was having none of it, pressing her for specifics she didn't have at her command and finally -- his glare set to iceberg blue, foot circling like a lasso -- he impatiently explained what the doctrine is, when it was introduced, and gave her another chance to answer.

My sympathy for Palin lasted only as long as it took me to remember that it was Palin who had insisted, at the top of the interview, that she's ready to lead the country on a moment's notice. Asked whether she had ever been outside the U.S. before her recent trip to the Middle East, she answered, ``Canada. Mexico.'' Asked what heads of state she had dealt with, she referenced all those trade delegations that came to Alaska looking to do some business.

When the interview turned to Iraq and Iran, Palin's innocence of diplomatic nuance, not to mention global politics, was something she couldn't dance around. We're America, she said, we don't have to put up with those uppity Eye-ranians.

Does she believe we are doing God's will in Iraq? ``I wouldn't presume to know God's will, Charlie,'' she answered gamely. Gibson was ready with a clip of her sermonizing not long ago in church and she danced around that one, too.

Gibson didn't ask the candidate if she has any clue about the principle of separation of church and state on which her beloved United States was founded. I wish he had.

New York City

Photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times
Senator Barack Obama met with former President Bill Clinton in his Harlem office before having lunch together today.

NYTimes: The two men met in Mr. Clinton’s 14th-floor office on 125th Street, with its sweeping southerly view of Central Park, and took a few questions from reporters while posing for pictures. Mr. Clinton said he had agreed to do “a substantial number of things” on behalf of Mr. Obama this fall, and would hit the campaign trail as soon as his Global Initiative conference concluded on Sept. 26.

“We’re putting him to work,” Mr. Obama joked.

Asked for his opinion about the state of the presidential race, Mr. Clinton replied, “I predict that Senator Obama will win and win handily.”

“There you go,” Mr. Obama added. “You can take it from the President of the United States. He knows a little something about politics. There’s nobody smarter in politics, and he’s going to be campaigning for us over the next eight weeks, which I’m thrilled by,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Letterman, who asked about the lunch.

“The race that he ran in ‘92 is — it was similar to what’s taking place now,” Mr. Obama added. “You had an economy that wasn’t working for people, you had a party that had been in power that didn’t seem particularly concerned that it wasn’t working for people, but, you know, he was new. He was young and people were still trying to figure out whether or not the guy was up to the job.”

Ed Ruscha

Gagosian Gallery
New York City, 1961

To the Editor

A Letter to the NYTimes:

Re “Two Conventions With No Shortage of Contrasts” (Political Memo, Sept. 4):

Choosing the most disturbing aspect of the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night might be difficult for some of your readers, but for me there was a clear winner: the “Drill, baby, drill!” chants from the audience.

Whether staged or spontaneous, those gleeful words showed a level of ignorance and recklessness that should be inconceivable today. It was as if global warming — the real social, political and economic challenge of the century — simply did not exist.

The moment I realized what they were chanting, I felt real sadness and fear for my 2-year-old child. We have to do better, and we have to do better now.

Dan Carsen

Birmingham, Ala., Sept. 4, 2008

September

Andrew Sullivan:
As the Palin pick starts dominating the news cycles - and not in a good way - you have to ask yourself what the fundamental point of this story is. I can't put it better than this reader:

I don't think it's Troopergate, the curious pregnancy, the pregnant unwed daughter, the Alaskan separatists, or the bottomless ignorance that makes the difference. Palin is by any measure the worst vice presidential pick of the modern age (which considering Agnew, Quayle and Eagleton is quite a statement). The killer is McCain's decision-making process and what this tells us about it. The man is a risk-taker who makes snap decisions "from the gut." He liked Palin. She looked like a maverick and a bit like himself. He didn't invest the time or resources to look into her deeply.

How can a person like this be put at the helm in a time of skyrocketing international tensions?

To my mind, this pick is not about Palin's unreadiness to be president. It's about McCain's unreadiness to be president. This act of judgment - a blend of ignorance, gut, cynicism, and pure egotism - makes him seem like a worse potential president than even George W. Bush. This is McCain's first real executive decision. And it is unbelievably shallow, incompetent and reckless.

How seriously does he take service to his country when he make a decision this important this crazily?