Smoking Presidents...

Drifting... drifting... all at sea...

Reading this at present

A history of the Great Depression: though I disagree with many things the author argues, it is a fascinating book.

All that had animated him

In Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, there is a fantastic and grotesque passage which has riveted itself into my memory. It describes the immediate aftermath of Tess's carriage being struck by the mail-cart, traveling the opposite way just before dawn. The shaft of the mail-cart pierces the chest of Prince, the horse pulling Tess's carriage, "like a sword." The result: Prince bleeds to death shockingly fast as Tess looks on, frantic, helpless, as the dawn slowly arrives. It is some of Hardy's most vivid writing:

"The atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook themselves in the hedges, arose, and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and Tess showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose a million prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking scarcely large enough to have let out all that had animated him."

Wicked Imagination

"And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually..." -- Genesis 6, verse 5.

Oh, the wickedness of imagination! Without a vivid internal monologue, my childhood would have become unbearable boredom.

I often think of all the public space around New York City, much of it simply used for traffic between one place and another. Imagine if we used spaces more creatively, more often... The example that I always think of was a play called Roam, performed in Edinburgh Airport in summer 2006.

I caught a part of it one day when I went to pick a friend up at the airport. An immaculately turned-out flight crew walking through the terminal, as though striding towards their plane, suddenly and deftly performed a routine about flying, identity, and the effects of traveling on the imagination.

It was delightful: at once the sour-looking assembly of people in the terminal was transformed into an audience (we all applauded together after the five minute routine) and it injected profound thoughts: when at an airport one is placed in the weird situation of being tightly constrained and closely scrutinized, while also completely freed from the bonds of normal, everyday life: if we are there as passengers, we get to fly, thousands of miles, perhaps to places unimaginably different: as playwright Ben Harrison said in an interview, "imagine what Bogotá would be like and you could be there in 12 hours."

Now, think of those enormous subway stations here in New York, such as West 4th Street and 145th Street, where the A, C, B, D, trains all converge. When you stand on one platform and look across at the broad swath of the other platform, imagine it as a stage. Imagine actors performing 60 or 90 second vignettes: I am sure it's been done already, and we're long accustomed to thinking of commuting as taking part in some great, mundane but never-ceasing human drama. but wouldn't it be wonderful to see performances in public more often?

Seventh Avenue looking south from 35th Street, December 5th, 1935

I dreamed of this, this morning

"He would make these trips to the Bronx ...

Untitled, South Bronx, 1984

...who in their right mind would want to go to the Bronx?"

At the Museum of the City of New York, photos of the carcass of the South Bronx from the 1980s by Ray Mortenson.

And that's just my living room...

The drill hall, Park Avenue Amory, NYC.

Does he really exist?

Summer Thoughts!

Bailout 2009

The bailout is now costing more than the following combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

BAILOUT: $4.6165 trillion (INCLUDING CitiBank)

Depression 2009

"... early last month, the English bookstore chain Waterstone's reported a 200 percent increase in the sales of books on keeping chickens." What might a 2009 Depression look like?

History is now and America

I just had to use this photo again, with this quotation from Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria:

"Some of us—especially those under 60—have always wondered what it would be like to live through the kind of epochal event one reads about in books. Well, this is it. We're now living history, suffering one of the greatest financial panics of all time. It compares with the big ones—1907, 1929—and we cannot yet know its full consequences for the financial system, the economy or society as a whole."

My father always preached the Ten Commandments (see below) in a way that many people found strange. He said that no one could ever expect to keep all ten commandments, all the time. Even "the thought of foolishness" is sin, according to Proverbs 24, verse 9. So instead, we were all meant to look at the Ten Commandments and realize that we could never reach God's exacting standard. Then we would know that only Christ's death for all sin was our way of escaping from being judged by that unreachable standard.

This is an unorthodox interpretation of the Ten... I can't help feeling that Wall Street and the economy would not be in such a mess if people had been less covetous, if they had not worshiped the US$ as a god, etcetera.

Keith Haring's Ten Commandments

I went to see Keith Haring's Ten Commandments at the Deitch Gallery in Queens, NY. Haring painted these enormous and mysterious 26-feet-tall canvases in Bordeaux, and until now, they have never been seen in the U.S.

I use the word mysterious, because as one views Haring's representations, it becomes difficult to understand which painting represents which commandment. Haring did not say which is which; some commandments, for example, 'Keep the Sabbath holy,' are more abstract than others, such as "Thou shalt not steal." This latter commandment is shown as someone stealing, the opposite of the commandment. Go see this show, it is wonderful.

Katyn Massacre Memorial, Exchange Place, Jersey City

At the Exchange Place PATH Train station in Jersey City, stands the striking statue of a soldier being bayoneted on the back. It commemorates the Katyn Massacre: on March 5th, 1940, almost 22,000 Polish Army officers were murdered in Katyn Forest by the Soviet NKVD, precursor to the KGB.

In the background of the photo are the towers of lower Manhattan (the World Trade Center was there as well), so unseen between the statue and the towers is the Hudson River.

A final farewell glance at President Bush

What the hell is he doing??!!

Secrets of the 2008 Campaign -- Newsweek

Newsweek has reporters in each campaign team. They get more access to see and hear than the rest of the press corps, on condition they do not reveal anything until after the election.

Sample: The debates unnerved both [Obama and McCain]. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when [NBC anchor] Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

"The Clinton campaign blew through cash: fancy hotels like the Bellagio in Las Vegas and the Four Seasons everywhere; thousands of dollars on flowers and valet parking; and one memorable $100,000 grocery bill at a Des Moines supermarket. Hillary never spent a night in a motel in rural Iowa if she could possibly avoid it. She preferred to overnight in the Presidential Suite in the Des Moines Embassy Suites and to fly alone in private jets, without the press or staff."

Spoof Times

Thousands of copies of an elaborate hoax edition of the New York Times were handed out free around the city this morning by volunteers for the Yes Men, a lefty pressure group. See above; the main story of the fake edition dated sometime in 2009 was the ending of the Iraq War. (Didn't it end when the moron-in-chief Bush arrived on that aircraft carrier deck with the "Mission Accomplished" banner?) Apparently the fake edition ran to 14 pages of utopian news and took six months to plan and execute -- AND must have cost a fortune!

The Trillion Dollar War

Latest news from the world's oldest Irish newspaper

The Southern Cross, the world's oldest continuously published Irish newspaper for overseas Irish, comes out monthly from Buenos Aires (yes, Argentina), as it has done since 1875. There has been an Irish community in Argentina since the early 19th century.

Obama suggests Nancy Reagan unhinged

At his first full-length press conference yesterday, a tired-looking President-Elect Obama dealt with a range of urgent issues and took questions from the press. [Note: Obama has already launched Change.gov to keep everyone up-to-date with his whirlwind of activities].

He also talked briefly about what kind of dog his two daughters might want when they move to Washington, D.C. And when asked if he had been in touch with past Presidents, he said yes, all of them -- then he clarified himself by saying "the living Presidents," and then joked that he: "didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances."

Which was kind of amusing. But later he issued an apology saying he meant former First Lady Nancy Reagan no disrespect.

[Above, an election night shot of Barack and Michelle, from the Flickr pool].

Spare a Dime for a Cat with a Lobster

Early casualty of the economic ill-wind: the art world. Two friends who work as art dealers/buyers/collectors both said more or less the same thing in the last week: their business has almost entirely vanished. Most nobody has money for art when money is tight...

Walk / Don't Walk

Pedestrian Sign from TopLeftPixel.

It's official!

Copies of the New York Times from last Wednesday are now selling on eBay for at least $300...
Dammit! And I didn't even see one anywhere in the city.

He did it!

© Callie Shell / Aurora for Time

"I was never the likeliest candidate for this office..." -- Obama's victory speech, Chicago, November 4th, 2008.

"I still don't understand this... his mother looks like a white woman to me..." -- George W. Bush.

Time to Vote! Go throw the Republican Party into the trash

Courtesy of Manhattan User's Guide, a short reminder:


Iraq

The Economy

Katrina

Guantanamo

Renditions and Torture

Abandoning the Kyoto Treaty

The Patriot Act

Fighting the formation of the 9/11 Commission

Veteran Care at Walter Reed

U.S. Attorney Firings

Valerie Plame Outing

The National Debt

Ignoring Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine

Stem Cell Research

Darfur



Repudiate them all. Vote Obama.

Nighttime New York

Overexposed: Times Square, originally uploaded by Stephen10031.

"As for the evening, it wafted away in seconds, the quick, furtive wing beats of the dark bird of sleepless night scattered its ashes. Suddenly, there was the sun, poking huge fingers through everything.

In the racing seconds from evening to sunrise, I saw the usual array of Manhattan night craziness: naked men, fumbling and churning each other, breathing too heavily, heaving urgency up out of their chests and shoulders. I saw a great crowd of young people, spilling in and out of a club, rah-ing and aw-ing at their own unique moment.

I saw police officers, jaws like armored bulldogs, scanning each dark corner, laser eyes sweeping with no mercy: do they fall on me, fall on guilty me? This time their police wheels spin on, past.

Then there were just those aimless scattergories of humans, limping out of the bar one last time. And then there was me, too fast, too hurried, too focused for the time of slumber, frantically stamping up and up another unnecessary hill to..." -- Father Jonathan Mercer.

Manhattan Mini Storage takes a stand...

I've been meaning to mention this for ages -- and many other people have pontificated about it already -- but local storage company Manhattan Mini Storage has been putting up overtly liberal, political ads for ages now.

The question I've been wanting to ask by bringing attention to the ad campaign, is: is MMS the only company with the balls to come up with ads which, while jokey, nevertheless have an edge to them that makes the (almost certainly sympathetic New York City-residing) passer-by appreciate both the gag and the underlying political message?

One of the strangest things about living through the eight years of George Bush's Presidency has been the complete lack of sustained, reasoned, angry opposition to the dirty hallion and his henchmen, even when they were at their most insanely illogical tilt. Every time they predicted welcoming-hero-liberator crowds in Baghdad, I watched and waited for someone to say "bullshit!" and instead, there was at best a sort of querulous noise which translated as "better get in line with them again."

I'm scratching through my brains, and to the best of my knowledge, all I can recall from the past eight years of any company or corporation prepared to say "eff you" to the powers that be, was a coffee joint (might have been a Starbucks but not sure) which, when former Senator Trent Lott suggest that the U.S. would have been better off maintaining racial segregation, advertised a new beverage: the Trent Latte, separate but equal -- black coffee in a cup with separate milk in a jug!

Does anyone know of a corporation as brazen as MMS? They got even edgier with this one, from a year or two ago:

[N.B: from BoingBoing, Jan 13th, 2003: "Kramerbooks, a bookstore/eatery just off Dupont Circle in Washington DC, is selling a new coffee drink, the Trent Lotte: A glass of black coffee, and a glass of steamed milk, in separate but equal portions."]

Happy Birthday, M A McKee, esq.!

Michael and snack, Upper East Side, originally uploaded by Stephen10031.

Goodnight, sweet print

On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper.

A song for today, Thursday October 30th, 2008.

One person only in the entire world will get this

Hey, I miss you! And them too...

Ancient Tubes Finally Buried At Ground Zero

Before the NYC Subway system, there was the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, which today we now call the PATH train, and consider it a sort of lame-ass frumpy second cousin to the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, L, M, N, Q, R, S, V, W and Z subway lines.

But it was the PATH that came first, and it was one of the engineering marvels of the age. The builders had to conquer the Hudson River, from Manhattan to New Jersey. They did it by building a cast-iron tunnel in sections, dropping the sections on to the riverbed and joining them into two long tubes. The water in the tubes was then pumped out. They were and are strong enough to withstand the pressure of the river water above and around them.

Above, one of the tubes, or tunnels. They were partially exposed by the World Trade Center catastrophe, because one of the PATH trains brought commuters from New Jersey into a station in the basement of the towers (several of the regular NYC subways also stopped under the WTC). An associated story in the New York Times...

Her brethren and sisters

So Sarah Palin's a Christian, huh? So what? Well, this is kind of a hobby horse with me, but it's important nonetheless. McCain could still unexpectedly win this election, then he could drop dead, and usher in the Age of President Palin.

Palin would almost certainly be the Christian Fundamentalist born-again true believer President whom George Bush never was, despite his cynical flirtation with the religious right (and their votes): Palin would truly believe that the clock of time is fast running out on hapless, sinful humanity, and while she might deny it in public, it is very probable that she would not be moved to do much anything about things like climate change, because, if as the Bible says, the planet and most of its inhabitants are soon to be toast, why bother to lift a finger to interfere with God's prophetic whirligig?

At the same time, she'd be hugely over-motivated to get involved in anything involving Israel, the Jews, Arab states, nuclear bombs, warfare, because God has given the true believers like her a blueprint in the Bible for how the End Times will begin and end.

What kind of Christian is Sarah Palin? She's an Evangelical / Fundamentalist type, and she has worshiped at Alaskan churches where belief in Dispensationalism is as important as Santa Claus is to Christmas. They believe in the actual, now, current and ongoing fulfillment of bible prophecy, and at best it can be described as: "and they all died unhappily, ever after [true believers like Palin excepted]."

Anything that is part of our contemporary world, from the Teletubbies to gay rights, from energy policy to earthquakes can be fitted (shoehorned) somewhere into the vague but colorful verses from the book of Revelations and the Prophecy of Daniel:

'Ed Kalnins, the pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God since 1999, recently told a journalist, "Scripture specifically mentions oil instability as a sign of the Rapture. We're seeing more and more oil wars. The contractions of the fulfilment of prophecies are getting tighter and tighter." Larry Kroon, pastor of Wasilla Bible, preached last July that God could destroy the earth as soon as this autumn by raising up "a revived, prosperous and powerful Communist Russia with a web of alliances across the Middle East." The Juneau Christian Center, also dispensationalist, last year played host to John Hagee, the Christian Zionist pastor whose endorsement McCain had to repudiate because he preached that God had used Hitler to drive European Jews to Palestine.' -- Frances Fitzgerald in the New York Review of Books.

In Alaska, Palin has associated regularly with her fellow believers in this dangerous mix of faith and fireballs since her childhood. Now, with McCain putting her on the ticket, they have at least a chance of seeing one of their own finally occupying the most powerful pulpit in the world: the Oval Office.

Here's a cute little cartoon from one of the most popular End Times web sites, which sort of sums up their world view, from the days not long after 9/11. That's Jesus leading a heavenly host into battle on Earth, having just apparently lobbed a 'fireball', or nuclear bomb, right on target into the Middle East. Go Jesus!

Many more scary cartoons can be viewed here. Note that some are actually quite humorous; don't let the humor dilute the fact that this is a deadly, dark, fatalistic and very dangerous world view, and that Sarah Palin almost certainly believes a great deal of this stuff.

[The CUNY Graduate Center in New York City hosted a 2007 conference which sought to bring attention to the "Real Agenda of the Religious Right"].

Peeping and muttering

From the Toronto Zombie Walk 2008, photo by Sam of TopLeftPixel.

"And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?" -- Isaiah chapter 8, verse 19.

The New York Times recommends B. Obama for all your country's needs

"The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable... Vote Obama or we're really fucked!"

The Times also has an interactive guide to all its Presidential endorsements, ever.

Take that, boss!

NEW YORK TIMES — A federal judge has awarded $4.6 million in back pay and damages to 36 delivery workers at two Saigon Grill restaurants in Manhattan, finding blatant and systematic violations of minimum-wage and overtime laws.

The delivery workers were earning two dollars an hour.

A Paolo Nutini moment

And I thought hello new shoes,
Bye bye them blues,
Take me wandering through these streets,
Where bright lights and angels meet,
Stone to stone they take me on,
I'm walking to the break of dawn...

Barack Obama is probably more photogenic than any Presidential candidate since JFK . Kennedy's big grin was the centerpiece of his charm (my mother remembers that "Kennedy was 'all teeth'), but you don't often see Obama smiling for the camera. Below, a comparatively rare smile.

Talking Points Memo update

New Poll: Obama Has Edge -- On Taxes And Family Values... Bad news for Republicans on two of their favorite issues in the new Ipsos/McClatchy poll: likely voters prefer Obama over McCain on taxes by 8 points, and Obama leads on the issue of family values by the same margin.

Poll: Palin Is Top Concern About McCain

Dow Plunges More Than 300 Points! (Again...)

Old news: Sarah Palin action figure available

The designers worked hard to get her insane Miss Satan stare just right, also her very strange interlocking knee-joints.

Granny takes a fall for the team

[Sorry, I am being way too cynical].

Obama leaving campaign trail to visit ailing grandmother

Barack Obama with his grandmother Madelyn Dunham at his high school graduation in 1979. (Photo: Obama for America, via Associated Press)

Updated | Senator Barack Obama will suspend his campaigning for more than 36 hours this week to visit his grandmother Madelyn Dunham, who is gravely ill in Hawaii.

Mrs. Dunham, 85, all but raised Mr. Obama during his teenage years in Hawaii, and he has spoken of her often on the campaign trail. A campaign spokesman, Robert Gibbs, declined to specify the nature of her illness, other than to say it was quite serious. Mrs. Dunham lives in Honolulu.

More: 

"My grandmother's the last one left," Obama told CBS "Early Show" co-anchor Harry Smith. The senator added, "She has really been the rock of the family, the foundation of the family." Obama didn't get to his mother before she died. "Yeah, got there too late," he says. "You know, I mean, it was sort of like this, in the sense that she had a terminal illness. We knew she wasn't doing well, but you know, the diagnosis was such that we thought we had a little more time and we didn't. And so I want to make sure that I don't make the same mistake twice."

Gee, Gmail!

When my friend Mary emails me, she often types her entire message in the subject line. Her emails are often brief, but not always. Anyway, the body of these emails is blank -- if you try to send an email like this in Gmail, you will get an unnecessary prompt:

Now, all you subject-line-only emailers can avoid this, thanks to a handy tip from Gmail:

'...you can add "EOM" or "(EOM)" at the end of the subject line (short for End Of Message), and Gmail will silently send the message without the unnecessary prompt.'

Republican group guffaws at Obama/fried chicken/watermelon jape

In Riverside, California, the local Republican Ladies group has paused from sharing ever-more exciting flan recipes to distribute its monthly newsletter, which states that Barack Obama's image should appear on food stamps, along with images of watermelons and, yes, fried chicken - accompanied by the image above.

'The October newsletter by the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated says if Obama is elected his image will appear on food stamps -- instead of dollar bills like other presidents. The statement is followed by an illustration of "Obama Bucks" -- a phony $10 bill featuring Obama's face on a donkey's body, labeled "United States Food Stamps."'

Gosh, how positively hilarious.

Even more hilarious: a Los Angeles Times columnist writes that: "Paranoid, rage-driven, xenophobic nuts are taking over the Republican Party." Also in the Los Angeles Times: the same columnist wonders will the noisy new horseless carriage which some have called the 'Auto-Mobile' ever replace the sturdy and reliable Mule?

New York City is the world's most courteous and polite

Today: some astonishing news about New York City: ranked the most courteous city in the world by the Readers' Digest. Also, an amusing graphic, and some more polling.
And don't fuckin' forget it!


A New York Times/CBS News poll found that 53 percent of voters would choose Barack Obama and 39 percent would choose John McCain if the election were today.

Another day, another ghastly Palin rally

Christopher Hitchens (above) has endorsed Obama, less out of enthusiasm for him than disgust at the McCain-Painful ticket: "The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin."

At yet another rally today, she stands up to speak, mentions Obama and a supporter roars: "kill him!" There is no condemnation of such viciousness from either her or McCain. She and he are tapping into the darkest forces of hate in America, and I hope they pay a breathtaking price for their folly. I hope current predictions of an Obama landslide prove accurate, and I hope the Republican Party is ruined and destroyed for at least a generation. [I'm still mentally preparing for a McCain win].

Poem for today, Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Wild Thing, originally uploaded by lightxposr.

The Importance of Elsewhere

Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognised, we were in touch

Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint
Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,
The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went
To prove me separate, not unworkable.

Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

[-- Philip Larkin]

Danny Cassidy, 1945 -- 2008

Danny Cassidy, Irish American scholar and activist, died yesterday in San Francisco after fighting a long battle with cancer. His 2007 book, "How the Irish Invented Slang," won the 2007 American Book Award for non-fiction.

I did not know him, but I can attest to the strength of feeling amongst some of my Irish friends here in New York: he was loved, was respected and now is mourned.

Cassidy argued in his book that many American English slang words were derived from Gaelic, a claim with which some disagreed. But if they thought his argument thin, they must never have experienced his vast passion for the Irish language. Here's how Corey Kilgannon of the New York Times described Cassidy's thesis:

'He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word “gimmick” seemed to come from “camag,” meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick.

Could “scam” have derived from the expression “’S cam é,” meaning a trick or a deception? Similarly, “slum” seemed similar to an expression meaning “It is poverty.” “Dork” resembled “dorc,” which Mr. Cassidy’s dictionary called “a small lumpish person.” As for “twerp,” the Irish word for dwarf is “duirb.”

Cassidy was born and raised in New York City and latterly taught Irish studies at the New College of California, in San Francisco. He also wrote the Irish language column for the Irish Echo newspaper in the last year. He helped found Irish Writers and Artists for Obama, which group formed early in the primary season to back Barack Obama (many Irish and Irish Americans lined up to back Hilary Clinton, which gave an unnerving glimpse into the racism that inhabits the community: when Clinton failed to win the nomination, some suggested publically that they would vote for McCain, which to me is the same as saying "I can't bring myself to vote for a black man, even if he's my party's nominee.")

As a bitter coda to Cassidy's cherished memory, but I sense that he would not have held back on the subject himself, I add this: his final battle with cancer was unnecessarily complicated by difficulties with health insurance and its costs, though he was a citizen of the world's richest nation, with the best cancer treatment and care in the world... if you are wealthy enough to pay enough for getting sick: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

The latest polls, a photo and a joke

[Photo of Belfast Lough via: BBC Northern Ireland]

TPM Track Composite: Obama 50.8%, McCain 42.5%

A vicar books into a hotel and says to the hotel clerk, "I hope the porn channel in my room is disabled?"

She says: "No sir, it's just regular porn. You sick bastard."

No ma'am, no ma'am

An unusual moment in this election race: a candidate comes face to face on television with one of his own supporter's credulity and prejudice, in such a way that he can't let her stupidity pass. And the prejudice just happens to be one which the candidate's campaign has been encouraging, in this case, the racist lie that Obama is some conflated variety of Arab-Muslim-Terrorist.

At a rally in Minnesota on Friday, a woman told McCain: "I don't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's a... a... an Arab."

McCain shook his head and said, "No ma'am, no ma'am. He's a decent family man...[a] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. That's what this campaign is all about."

As McCain shook his head, the woman said "No?" falteringly, as if relieved to be corrected about something she scarcely believed herself. Alternatively, her "No?" could be interpreted as her saying, "Oh, I just realized that in raising the Obama-Arab prejudice I've put you on the spot, and you're having to deny it."

Well, at least he came right out and corrected her. But actually, he could have been much more emphatic.

As McCain said no, weakly meaning 'Obama is not an Arab or a Muslim,' the crowd, his own, booed at him.

Politicking for the (allegedly) most powerful job in the world has always been intoxicating, and brings out the best as well as the worst in candidates. But it seems that this race has driven McCain out of his mind.