The BYM and I were in Raleigh earlier this week for a conference. On our last day there, we walked to the Duck & Dumpling for lunch at the same time an Obama rally was taking place at a park across the street. We passed a pub along the way that had this sign out front:



In this morning's New York Times, there's a column by Gail Collins called Confessions of a Phone Solicitor. It ends with this kicker: "For John McCain, the best question now is not whether he’s going to lose, but what kind of a country he’d wind up with if he won after a campaign even a telemarketer can’t love."

In Tuesday's Times, Maureen Dowd wrote about Colin Powell's choice to endorse Obama:

He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not McCain, had said: “ ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”

In today's obituaries, William Grimes's tribute to English novelist Peter Vansittart ended with these paragraphs:

To the end he remained caviar for critics, a stranger to the best-seller list. The temperament that gave his novels their particular savor barred popular success.

“I have I suppose, a rather deeply ingrained pessimism, leavened, I hope, with a certain amount of humor and a certain amount of feeling for the sheer juiciness of life,” he told Raymond H. Thompson, professor emeritus of English at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. “The ship is going down, but in the meantime there’s a song to be sung.”

And, from Sunday's paper, at the end of Laura Winters's essay on film director Philippe Claudel:

It’s very hard never to make a mistake in life and always to know what the right choice is. Many years ago I met the French anthropologist Germaine Tillion, who had always been on the good side of things: she was in the Resistance early on, she denounced torture during the Algerian War. I asked her, ‘How did you manage never to make a mistake?’ ” Mr. Claudel paused for a moment. “She replied, ‘It was just by chance.’ ”