The Walker Brothers:

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The Searchers:

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Krugman seems astounded that a political figure would go on the teevee and lie. That’s kind of cute, that it still surprises him:

OK, that’s weird. I just taped This Week, which included an interview with Christine Lagard, the French finance minister. In her defense of austerity, she asserted that unemployment in France is down from 9.6 to 9.3. But I looked it up on Eurostat (pdf), which has French unemployment in August at 10.1, up from 9.6 a year ago.

Maybe she has somewhat different data — French concepts versus harmonized? was that a September number? — but one thing is clear: if the unemployment decline isn’t visible in the standard numbers, it can’t be that solid.

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Susan Collins.

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The Shoes:

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You know, Linda, I believe in the First Amendment, too. (If I can put up with Fred Phelps, I can put up with anything.) But it’s a tad disingenuous to pretend that this type of WWE programming isn’t specifically aimed at demeaning women for a certain appreciative segment of the viewers. That’s how you made your money, after all!

And it raises what would be a much better question than the one asked by Armenpour: If you would do this because it made money, what wouldn’t you do for money? Where, exactly, is that line? Because as you know, U.S. Senators have quite a lot of power and you should answer that question.

But let’s not ignore the sheer entertainment value of this question, either. Our national politics have deteriorated to the point where we’re asking a candidate for the U.S. Senate if an S&M theme is suitable family entertainment:

AMANPOUR: They say a vote for Linda McMahon is a slap in the face for Connecticut women. the whole issue of the women in the ring and what they call degrading and demeaning behavior towards women. I’m a woman, you’re a woman –

MCMAHON: Yes

AMANPOUR: What do you really think when you see some of that go on in the ring? The girl who is told to get on all fours, I think by your own husband and bark like a dog? Are you comfortable with that?
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Bob Herbert:

We can go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threaten to blow Iran off the face of the planet. We can conduct a nonstop campaign of drone and helicopter attacks in Pakistan and run a network of secret prisons around the world. We are the mightiest nation mankind has ever seen.

The United States is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It’s losing its soul. It’s speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough.

The railroad tunnel was the kind of infrastructure project that used to get done in the United States almost as a matter of routine. It was a big and expensive project, but the payoff would have been huge. It would have reduced congestion and pollution in the New York-New Jersey corridor. It would have generated economic activity and put thousands of people to work. It would have enabled twice as many passengers to ride the trains on that heavily traveled route between the two states.
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Speaking of Beatlesque:

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But Obama’s no FDR.

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