“Sibu VIII,” from “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder,” 2003, by Nontsikelelo "Lolo" Veleko
“The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End” continues through March 22 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art” continues through Dec. 6 at the Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village; (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart.
International meltdown
NYTimes:
“There was no specific story about today; right now we are in a freefall of fear and people are using any opportunity to sell,” said Richard Sparks, senior equities analyst at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. He said the falls were driven by pessimism that the series of actions unveiled by governments around the world were still not enough to end the financial crisis.
Investors “still think that this is not out of the woods yet,” he said. “Even with government help, you may have banks that may not make it.”
10.33 pm. This was, I think, a mauling: a devastating and possibly electorally fatal debate for McCain. Even on Russia, he sounded a little out of it. I've watched a lot of debates and participated in many. I love debate and was trained as a boy in the British system to be a debater. I debated dozens of times at Oxofrd. All I can say is that, simply on terms of substance, clarity, empathy, style and authority, this has not just been an Obama victory. It has been a wipe-out.It has been about as big a wipe-out as I can remember in a presidential debate. It reminds me of the 1992 Clinton-Perot-Bush debate. I don't really see how the McCain campaign survives this.
Gallup:
The nine percentage point lead in Oct. 4-6 tracking matches Obama's highest to date for the campaign, and the highest for either candidate. Obama led McCain by 49% to 40% near the tail end of his international trip in late July. Obama has now held a statistically significant lead since Sept. 24-26 polling and has not trailed McCain since Sept. 13-15, roughly coinciding with the intensification of the financial crisis.
This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.
Dick Cheney, Role Model
Excerpts:
In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.
In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”
It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin’s remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency — as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy.
....
Mr. Cheney has long taken the bizarre view that the lesson of Watergate was that Congress was too powerful and the president not powerful enough. He dedicated himself to expanding President Bush’s authority and arrogating to himself executive, legislative and legal powers that are nowhere in the Constitution.
....
In an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, the Alaska governor was asked what she thought was the best and worst about the Cheney vice presidency. Ms. Palin tried to dodge: laughing and joking about the hunting accident in which Mr. Cheney accidentally shot a friend. The only thing she had to add was that Mr. Cheney showed support for the troops in Iraq.
There was not a word about Mr. Cheney’s role in starting the war with Iraq, in misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction, in leading the charge to create illegal prison camps where detainees are tortured, in illegally wiretapping Americans, in creating an energy policy that favored the oil industry that made him very rich before the administration began.
Ms. Couric asked Joseph Biden ... the same question in a separate interview. He had it exactly right when he told her that Mr. Cheney’s theory of the “unitary executive” held that “Congress and the people have no power in a time of war.” And he had it right in the debate when he called Mr. Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American history.”
The Constitution does not state or imply any flexibility in the office of vice president. It gives the vice president no legislative responsibilities other than casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate when needed and no executive powers at all. The vice president’s constitutional role is to be ready to serve if the president dies or becomes incapacitated.
Any president deserves a vice president who will be a sound adviser and trustworthy supporter. But the American people also deserve and need a vice president who understands and respects the balance of power — and the limits of his or her own power. That is fundamental to our democracy.
Photo: Darren Hauck/Getty
Joe Klein:Part of Obama's steadiness is born of necessity: An angry, or flashy, black man isn't going to be elected President. But I've also gotten the sense, in the times I've interviewed and chatted with him, that calm is Obama's natural default position. He is friendly, informal, accessible...and a mystery, hard to get to know. He doesn't give away much, doesn't — unlike Bill Clinton — have that desperate need to make you like him. His brilliant, at times excessive, oratory is an outlier — the only over-the-top, Technicolor quality he has.
There has been no grand cathartic moment for him in this campaign, but rather a steady accretion of trust, a growing public sense that he knows what he's talking about and isn't going to get crazy on us. His demeanor has rendered foolish all the rumors about his alleged radicalism. This guy is the furthest thing imaginable from an extremist; McCain, by his own admission, is the bomb-thrower in this race.
"McCain is interviewed by the Washington Blade. Well: he supplied written answers to written questions. Nonetheless: good for him. His Senate chief of staff is openly gay and long has been. McCain never made the gay thing important in my own dealings with him. I personally gave him a copy of Virtually Normal a decade ago, and we've had civil conversations about HIV and gay issues. He's not an indecent man in private. But his campaign has been indecent, he does oppose every single measure to grant gays even the slightest degree of civil equality and supports the persecution of gay men and women serving their country honorably. He picked a running-mate more anti-gay than any candidate in the recent history of the GOP. I'm sorry but I'm not going to fall for another W. Once is enough. "
