Illustration: Shout

Mumbai

Getty Images

San Francisco

Thanksgiving Day

Hayes Valley

San Francisco

Mr B

Montana

Photo: Lois Shelden/NYTimes

Los Angeles

Photo: Todd Selby
NYTimes: With his landlord's blessing, Brian Lichtenberg, a self-taught fashion designer, decorated one of the bathrooms in his Los Angeles house with a Givenchy tile logo.

California

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California's highest court has agreed to hear legal challenges to a new ban on gay marriage, but is refusing to allow gay couples to resume marrying until it rules.

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday accepted three lawsuits seeking to overturn Proposition 8. The amendment passed this month with 52 percent of the vote. The court did not elaborate on its decision.

All three cases claim the ban abridges the civil rights of a vulnerable minority group. They argue that voters alone did not have the authority to enact such a significant constitutional change.

Richard Clarke

"Obama's election has taken the wind out of al Qaeda's sails in much of the Islamic world because it demonstrates America's renewed commitment to multiculturalism, human rights, and international law. It also proves to many that democracy can work and overcome ethnic, sectarian, or racial barriers.

"Obama's commitment to withdraw from Iraq also takes away an al Qaeda propaganda tenet: that the U.S. seeks to occupy oil rich Arab lands. His commitment to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan also challenges their plans. Most of all, by returning to American values the world admires, Obama sets al Qaeda back enormously in the battle of ideas, the ideological struggle which determines whether al Qaeda will continue to have significant support in the Islamic world."

Thursday, November 19, 1863

Scan: New York Times
(click image to enlarge)

"...and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Howard Dean on Lieberman

"My point of view is that Barack won," Dean said. "He can afford to be magnanimous. And if we happen to win both recounts and Georgia, Joe is the 60th vote. And the truth is -- and I certainly don't have to defend Joe Lieberman because, you know, we have an interesting history -- but the fact is, he does vote 90 percent of the time with the Democrats. And no, he shouldn't have said all those things. But why not clean the slate? Why not start all over again? Why not allow him to vote with us on the 90 percent of the stuff? He will be a good vote on climate change -- and this matters. He may be a good vote on election reform, which I hope we will get to. So, you know, he may end up - though it is a little against the odds -- he may end up being the vote that allows us to conduct business when Mitch McConnell decides we shouldn't."

Illustrator: Jason Fulford

Illustrator: Nathan Fox

Athens

Photo: Pantelis Saitas/European Pressphoto Agency

NYTimes: A large demonstration passed the United States Embassy in Athens on the anniversary of the students' uprising against the American-backed military junta in 1973. Thousands of demonstrators marched in pouring rain to mark the bloody revolt. Riot police officers ran from the flames of a firebomb outside the American Embassy in Athens during the demonstration. About 10,000 people braved a thunderstorm to mark the 35th anniversary of the student uprising against the military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967-74.

Boston, Massachusetts

Wanda Sykes

"I’m proud to be a woman, I’m proud to be a black woman, and I’m proud to be gay."

Deyrolle

Photo: Francois Mori/Associated Press
NYTimes
Elaine Sciolino

Published: November 14, 2008

PARIS — When a fire ripped through Deyrolle, the beloved taxidermy establishment here, early one morning last February, it was as if a dagger had been plunged into the heart of Paris. “I have my own drawer of bugs and butterflies from Deyrolle,” said Bruce Guenther, chief curator at Oregon’s Portland Art Museum. “Whenever I came to Paris with friends, I’d take them there. It was a place of dreams.”

http://tinyurl.com/6gq4ad

Herman Miller

Mirra Green Chair

"The Mirra chair adheres to the McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) Cradle to Cradle Design Protocol. Certified: it is certified to MBDC Cradle to Cradle Gold and Silver, depending on configuration. Mirra is GREENGUARD certified and can contribute to LEED certification. Recylable: Mirra is made of a minimal number of parts and is easily disassembled for recycling."

(click on image to enlarge)

Andrew Sullivan

Senator Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State

That's the buzz. Marc reports that Clinton and Obama met yesterday in Chicago. For my part, I think making her secretary of state is an inspired idea.

Obama has to offer something to Clinton. She's his main threat now and rightly regards part of his victory her doing. The primaries helped him. Left to fester in the Senate, Clinton will plot against the president if he doesn't actively seek her support and engagement and "spread the political wealth" of his mandate. It is a senior enough position not to be fobbed off; it really does take advantage of the Clinton name abroad; it could even put Bill to good use and keep him out of mischief; and Obama has kept telling us that his cabinet model is "Team Of Rivals." Giving Hillary that kind of position is straight out of Lincoln.

Unlike the vice-presidency, a secretary of state has real constitutionally-designated things to do. From Clinton's point of view, it would be a natural position from which to run to succeed Obama in 2016 (or to make an inside push to oust him in 2012). The emergence of Max Baucus as the front senator for healthcare seems to me that Obama might have already been signaling this maneuver. If Clinton isn't the lead player on healthcare, what is she going to do?

So here's hoping he offers and she accepts. It's an elegant and shrewd move; both public spritied and yet coldly calculating at the same time. Pure Obama.

George Clooney

"At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black."

San Francisco

Photo: Sara Remington for The New York Times

Renovation of an 1896 house in the Haight by Casper and Lexie Mork-Ulnes: a nearly $200,000 renovation over the course of five years. Salvaged lumber was glued together to form the butcher-block treads of the parlor staircase; chips and nail holes were left exposed. The railing is made of shower-door glass and industrial hardware.

Beijing

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
A satellite image shows a dense blanket of polluted air over central eastern China covering the coastline around Shanghai. The "Asian Brown Cloud" is a toxic mix of ash, acids and airborne particles from car and factory emissions, as well as from low-tech polluters like wood-burning stoves.
NYTimes:

A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, wood-burning kitchen stoves and coal-fired power plants, these plumes of carbon dust rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

Emergency Congo Summit

Photo: Tony Karumba/Agence France-Presse —Getty Images
From left, Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka of Kenya, Chairperson Jean Ping of the African Union Commission, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo Republic, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi, U.N. Special Envoy for East Congo Olusegun Obasanjo and President Joseph Kabila of Congo.

Baghdad

Photo: Joao Silva for The New York Times
Iraqi soldiers surveyed the scene of a car bombing in a car park in central Baghdad that killed four people, including two police officers, and wounded 14 others.

Iraqi Soldier Reportedly Kills 2 G.I.’s

By Sam Dagher/NYTimes:

Maj. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, commander of American troops in northern Iraq, said it began when two platoons of American soldiers stopped at a combat outpost staffed by Iraqi soldiers. Two American lieutenants went inside to an office to speak with an Iraqi captain while soldiers from both sides waited outside.

Suddenly, General Hertling said, an Iraqi soldier with an AK-47 that was equipped with a 70-round drum walked up to the group of soldiers, said something to an Iraqi soldier and then shot one American soldier in the head and another in the stomach. He then began spraying bullets in all directions, the general said, at which point the Americans shot him dead. One American soldier died on the spot, and the other later died from his wounds.

General Hertling said the shooting remained under investigation by both sides. He declined to say what the Iraqi assailant had said before he began shooting.

An Iraqi Army officer and two soldiers who witnessed the altercation provided a more detailed account, one they told on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from their commanders.

They said that an American military patrol stopped Wednesday afternoon to inspect a post staffed by Iraqi soldiers in the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Zanjili, a notoriously violent part of Mosul.

A heated argument ensued between one of the American soldiers and an Iraqi soldier identified as Barzan Mohammed Abdullah, prompting the American to curse the Iraqi, spit in his face and slap him, the Iraqis said. The Iraqi soldier then opened fire on the Americans, they said, and other American soldiers responded with a barrage of fire at the Iraqi.

Mio

Paperforms Wall Tiles
Designer
Jaime Salm

Renewable + Recycled Content + Recyclable + Closed Loop Manufacturing.
Made from 100% post and pre-consumer waste paper.
Modularity enables the replacement of damaged tiles and provides color and texture where it is needed. The tiles nest tightly conserving space and therefore energy needed for transportation.
Made in the USA, United Kingdom and Mexico from locally sourced materials.

Arianna Huffington

During the campaign, Obama was an object lesson in equanimity.
Insinuate he's Muslim or sympathizes with terrorists, and he brushes
off the mud. Hammer him with trumped up charges -- "sexist,"
"socialist," un-American" -- and he rolls with the punches. He simply
doesn't let it in. He demonstrates that we have the ability to master
whether we allow setbacks and attacks to throw us off course.

A lot has been written about Obama's calm in the face of adversity
over the course of the last 21 months. Less noted has been how he
displays that same centeredness in the face of triumph.

William Eggleston

Photo: Eggleston Artistic Trust

NYTimes:
Around 1965, [Eggleston] started to use color film, and his range expanded. This teenage boy is ordinary, but the golden sunlight that falls on him is not: it turns his red hair lustrous and gilds his skin. A prosaic subject is transformed, but unromantically; lifted up, but just a little, just enough.

Stanford White

Photo: Bruce Buck for The New York Times
Astor Courts, Rhinebeck, New York

Charlie Cook

On Obama:

"I'm not inclined to underestimate him."

Design: Nicholas Leggett

Illustrator: Patrick Moberg

Chicago

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with members of an economic advisory board in Chicago on Friday. From left: David E. Bonior, Robert E. Rubin, Jennifer Granholm, Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., President-elect Obama, Paul A. Volcker and Richard D. Parsons.

NYTimes — President-elect Barack Obama convened a new economic advisory board to meet here on Friday as he moves to swiftly fill top administration posts and form his response to the economic crisis.

No incoming president in modern times has been so pressured to begin governing, in effect, before he is sworn into office. With that in mind, Mr. Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. have brought a group of high-profile financial and economic experts to Chicago for Friday’s meeting. In responding, Mr. Obama must strike a delicate balance between cooperating with an unpopular president whose policies he campaigned to change, and the inclination to wait until he takes charge in two and a half months to prescribe his own remedies.

Baghdad

NYTimes

Barack Obama may have been elected only three days ago, but his victory is already beginning to shift the political ground in Iraq and the region.

Iraqi Shiite politicians are indicating that they will move faster toward a new security agreement about American troops, and a Bush administration official said he believed that Iraqis could ratify the agreement as early as the middle of this month.

“Before, the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no respect for the schedule of troop withdrawal by Dec. 31, 2011,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite party. “If Republicans were still there, there would be no respect for this timetable. This is a positive step to have the same theory about the timetable as Mr. Obama.”

Rahm Emanuel

I know what a privilege it is to serve in the White House, and am humbled by the responsibility we owe the American people. I’m leaving a job I love to join your White House for one simple reason - like the record amount of voters who cast their ballot over the last month, I want to do everything I can to help deliver the change America needs. We have work to do, and Tuesday Americans sent Washington a clear message – get the job done.

I have loved the time I spent in the House, both the successes and the setbacks, and I am grateful to the people of the Fifth Congressional district who sent me to work on their behalf. I was proud to serve on a leadership team with Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn. They have taught me invaluable lessons—even a few lessons in humility, believe it or not.

I want to say a special word about my Republican colleagues, who serve with dignity, decency and a deep sense of patriotism. We often disagree, but I respect their motives. Now is a time for unity, and Mr. President-elect, I will do everything in my power to help you stitch together the frayed fabric of our politics, and help summon Americans of both parties to unite in common purpose.

It has been almost 150 years since Americans turned to a proud son of Illinois as their President. Early in his first term, Abraham Lincoln said, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew."

Today, once again, our country is piled high with difficulty, and Americans have put their trust in President-elect Barack Obama and Vice-President-elect Joe Biden to think and act anew. And Mr. President-elect, I promise that your White House will do everything in our power to rise to the occasion.

History

James Estrin/The New York Times

NYTimes:

At Eagle Academy, an all-boys school in Brooklyn, pupils watched a replay of Barack Obama’s victory speech on Wednesday. And when it was over, the principal of Eagle Academy, where boys are divided into groups named for famous black figures like Thurgood Marshall and Duke Ellington, asked them to sum it up in one word.

“Heartwarming,” one said. “Outstanding,” offered another. “Magnificent.” “Amazing.”

The 30-year-old principal, Rashad Meade, pushed his protégés, asking why they thought this speech, this moment, was so important — why he had rearranged classes to show the video, why their parents had woken them the night before. Isaiah Purcell, who is 11, started to say something about the issues, then trailed off. He picked up again, asserting that Mr. Obama’s ascendancy to the White House “makes us think that we could accomplish anything when you put your mind to it.”

Fala

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his little dog, Fala.

"We ain't what we was."

From Nicholas Kristof/NYTimes:

Considering that past, perhaps the most incisive comment on Mr. Obama’s election actually came long ago. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the Hawaii Legislature in 1959, two years before Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu, and declared that the civil rights movement aimed not just to free blacks but “to free the soul of America.”

Mr. King ended his Hawaii speech by quoting a prayer from a preacher who had once been a slave, and it’s an apt description of the idea of America today:

“Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

Rahm Emanuel

NYTimes:
Representative Rahm Emanuel, a fierce and consummate navigator of the capital’s political terrain, on Thursday accepted President-elect Barack Obama’s offer to become his White House chief of staff.

A veteran of the Clinton administration and a fellow member of Congress from Illinois, Mr. Emanuel has been a close adviser to Mr. Obama. He offers innate instincts for how a White House operates, as well as strong connections with Democratic leaders in Congress.

Barack Obama

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

Barack Obama Elected President of the United States

NYTimes: Adam Nagourney

Published: November 4, 2008

Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

Mr. Obama’s election amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.

Illustration: Keetra Dean Dixon/NYTimes

Approval rating for Bush: current trend estimate 24.2 percent.

Final TPM Track Composite:

Obama 51.9%

McCain 44.3%

John Cusack

We are asked to stand over the abyss and experience our own destruction as another political game show -- just another surreal horse race. We watch millionaires and paid Republican hacks appear on television yelling "Socialist!" at Obama as if the Bolsheviks are coming to rape our daughters. These are the same people who oversaw the greatest upward redistribution of wealth in the history of this country.

The same people who, through general lawlessness and a privatization frenzy, succeeded in shredding the Constitution, turning war, illegal domestic spying, security, border patrol, interrogation, and even torture into profitable industries gorging on the state.

Photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times
Supporters cried and cheered as Senator Barack Obama made his entrance at a campaign rally at Veteran's Memorial Auditorium in Jacksonville, Fla., the day before the country will elect a new president.

Photo: Joao Silva for The New York Times
NYTimes:
American soldiers walked past a blast wall at Al Awad on the outskirts of Taji, Iraq, where the word VOTE has been spray painted, the day before the presidential election in the United States.

Andrew Sullivan

Madelyn Payne Dunham RIP

Obama was so right to make sure he spent time with her before she passed on. But what an emotional blow on election eve for the candidate from Illinois. He has survived this campaign with remarkable emotional maturity and self-control. I just wish this didn't have to add to it. None of his parents will witness tomorrow. But somewhere my faith teaches me: they know already. Maybe Toot couldn't wait for the actual results. Maybe she's now a few steps ahead even of Chuck Todd. May she rest in peace. She did good.

Washington Post

Bush has not commanded approval from a majority of the nation since early 2005, making him arguably the most disliked president since polling on the question began in the 1930s. A Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll last week put Bush's approval rating at 24 percent and found that McCain had made little headway in separating himself from Bush or his policies.

It's not for lack of trying. For the first time in recent memory, a sitting president has effectively sat out the presidential race, avoiding public appearances on behalf of McCain and other Republicans and raising far less money than usual in private fundraisers. Bush voted for McCain by absentee ballot rather than voting in person in Texas, as he has for the past three elections, and officials say he plans to spend election night at the White House rather than at a rally or other campaign-related event. . . .

"This is unprecedented for a president to be this invisible during a campaign," said Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "This is what happens when you have a 25 percent approval rating."

Christopher Hitchens

On McCain/Palin:

Anyone who does care should be getting ready to vote against this humiliating ticket, a team that so farcically and horribly unites the senescent and the puerile.

Saturday morning

Reflecting Wednesday's half hour television buy:

Barack Obama leads John McCain in Gallup Poll Daily tracking interviewing conducted Wednesday through Friday by an identical 52% to 42% margin among both traditional likely voters and expanded likely voters. Obama leads by a similar 52% to 41% margin among all registered voters.