Tonight's taste of Soul comes from a little bit more familiar territory. Rodger Collins is alive and well and recording up a storm and he has a new album out to prove it. In 1967 he recorded what I thought was probably the biggest hit of that year. Only I was wrong. I did some research on tonight's track, and She's Looking Good only made it to #101 on the pop charts and #34 on the R&B charts. That's weird, because I distinctly remember hearing it almost constantly for weeks on end in the early part of 1967. Perhaps I imagined the whole thing or maybe I just assumed I heard it everywhere.

In any case, it's a great track by an artist who is still with us and a reminder that good music has no sell-by date.

Rest In Peace, Tony Curtis

Open thread below

Stephen Colbert got his digs on Supreme Court Justice and Constitutional "originalist" Antonin Scalia in his Word segment as only he can.

You know what else is insane folks? All the special rights minorities are asking for these days. Gay Americans want the right to be married in California. Mexican Americans want the right to drive through Arizona. And Muslim Americans want the right to be Muslims.

But if we keep giving the rights, there will be fewer rights left for us. That’s just mad. Well luckily there is a way to preserve our rights and it brings us to tonight’s Word—Original Spin.

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I don't know of many songs that capture the pain and desperation of a break up as well as this one does. I spent a night boozing with Mike Skinner of The Streets a few years back, and when I asked him about this song he told me that he likes to write songs as if he were writing movies. What's your favorite breakup song?

September 30, 1985 wasn't all about politics for a change. It was on this day that French movie legend Simone Signoret passed away, leaving a rich legacy of unforgettable films. There were also Americans kidnapped in Beirut, violence in South Africa and the aftermath of Hurricane Gloria leaving most of Long Island without power. Mexico was recovering from a massive earthquake, the Stock Market decided to open a half hour earlier and toyed with the idea of staying open 24 hours a day. Ahead of his visit to France, Mikhail Gorbachev put forth a proposal for limiting nuclear weapons. And to top it all off, September 30th was the day a 19% tax increase on liquor went into effect.

Was nothing sacred?

Apparently not, twenty-five years ago this day.

California's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman, is getting hit from all sides today on immigration-- not just because of her flip-flopping on the topic, but because of the shocking allegations being brought forward by her nanny of nine years, Nicky Diaz Santillan.

At a press conference yesterday, the former housekeeper choked back tears as she described her treatment by Whitman:

Santillan said she asked Whitman for help in finding an immigration attorney in June 2009, and explained to her that she moved from Mexico because she had "no job, no food, no place to live, and for that reason we made a decision to move here."

Whitman terminated her not long after she made the appeal, Santillan said, telling her, "don't say anything to my children, I will tell them you already have a new job and that you want to go to school and from now on, you don't know me and I don't know you. You never have seen me, and I have never seen you. Do you understand me?

Whitman "treat me as if I was not a human being," Santillan added, suggesting the candidate was "throwing me away like a piece of garbage."

Now, SEIU has released ads that take Whitman on over both her immigration positions and the nanny scandal (in Spanish):

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This one's personal. I've been NOT represented in Congress for 23 years by a Congressman you've probably never heard of: Elton Gallegly (R-CA). He rarely speaks on the House floor, serves on a couple of committees but doesn't do much, and his single legislative achievement was overturned by the Supreme Court because it overreached.

However, it appears that if one is a business owner in Simi Valley who donates to Gallegly's campaign, a bonanza in the form of earmarks might appear. Here's the story.

Microwave Monolithics is a privately-held company in Simi Valley, Gallegly's home town. Daniel Ch'en is the CEO. Daniel Ch'en (aka Daniel Chen) has donated more than $16,000 to Gallegly. In 2008, Ch'en was rewarded with a $1.2 million dollar contract for their "Global Personal Recovery System Single Card Solution". According to Microwave Monolithics' site, this item does the following:

GPRS is a joint Civil/DoD initiative to develop and deploy the first global, near real-time two-way communications and tracking system capable of fully supporting Joint Blue Force Situation Awareness (JBFSA) and Personnel Recovery (PR) / Search-And-Rescue (SAR) operations among many other world-wide applications. It is seamlessly interoperable across agencies, with two dozen separate government agencies already involved (including our allies in the United Kingdom), and enables the emergency communications desperately needed today by disadvantaged isolated personnel such as downed pilots, dismounted soldiers, and other personnel often in hostile and/or dangerous situations on remote parts of the earth.

Basically, it's a beacon. While I certainly want whatever tools are available to rescue service members downed or stranded in enemy territory, I question the allocation of this particular earmark to this contributor by this Congressman under what appears to be a no-bid process with no accompanying request from the military that I could find. Further, this company was one of the largest Gallegly donors in the defense sector. EDO Corp was the largest contributor, and they make...you guessed it...GPS systems, among other things. Accompanying the $1.2 million earmark to Microwave Monolithics? A $2 million earmark for Point Mugu Air Station to upgrade their electronic warfare laboratory.

Connect the dots.

Here is a Congressman who does nothing for most of the constituents in his district, maybe nothing for much of anyone except one consistent donor to his campaigns. During the health care debate he refused to meet with constituents or even directly respond to questions, and now he's rumbling about joining the Tea Party caucus. This, despite the fact that this district has turned a solid purple and went for Obama by a wide margin in 2008.

No on health care reform. No on financial reform. No on the stimulus, despite taking credit at ribbon-cutting ceremonies for stimulus projects. But for one donor, $1.2 million in one big, giant government buy.

When you follow the money, it leads to dark, ugly, smelly places. And sometimes, it leads to a request for an ethics investigation. Bring it.

(Note: Legistorm aggregates the award to Microwave Monolithics with an earmark for NAWCWD Pt. Mugu. I could find nothing on their website showing an award to Microwave Monolithics, but it appears as though the Mugu/MM awards were related.)

It seems no matter what the Republicans do, it's always going to get framed as being good for them in the upcoming elections even when their actions are doing harm to actual Americans. Surprisingly, the usually hackish John King pointed out to Red State's Erick Erickson that there is quite a bit of meaningful legislation that the Republicans have been blocking. No matter though. In Erickson's book, it's all good for them in the upcoming mid-terms. I think unfortunately since so few people are actually paying attention to how they're governing and the media is allowing them to get away with it by not covering it properly, he's right that they won't pay a price for it.

Erickson also repeats their latest talking point about how "concerned" everyone is over the upcoming lame duck session. Media Matters has more on that.

Conservatives disappear GOP's Clinton impeachment to bash "corrupt" Democrat-led lame duck session:

Conservative media figures have repeatedly claimed or suggested that it would be unprecedented and "corrupt" for Democrats to address "controversial" issues during Congress' lame duck session following the 2010 elections. But in 1998, Republicans impeached President Clinton during such a post-election congressional session.

Go read the whole rest for a little trip down memory lane on what the Republicans did during their lame duck session.

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Austan Goolsbee reproduces an easy-to-follow chart showing the differences between continuing the Bush tax cuts and the proposed Obama tax plan. Goolsbee was on The Rachel Maddow Show last month as she first showed the chart from Ezra Klein at the Washington Post. The figures came from the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Goolsbee's appearance can be seen in this post at Crooks & Liars, seen here.

Introducing White House Whiteboard. In this first edition, Austan Goolsbee, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers here at the White House, tackles the tax cut fight and what it means that Congressional Republicans are "holding middle class tax cuts hostage" as the President has said.

P.S. The White House have linked their YouTube video to a site that supports Glenn Beck. That's some serious snark and thumb-nosing.

For all the whooping over how Republicans and the Tea Party leverage social media, they sure are good at leaving their gaffes out there for everyone to see. You can't make this stuff up...check out Joe Miller's tweets last night, now deleted.

In case you can't read the small print, it seems that Tea Party Joe is visiting Washington DC and the DC Tea Party. While he's there, he wants to shop for office furniture, house hunt, and look into name plaques for his door. He's also looking forward to meeting his "future colleagues".

Not so fast Joe. Those tweets, now deleted, were caught by "WriteInLisa", or Lisa Murkowski, who is running a strong write-in campaign. According to Nate Silver, she just might win, too. While Murkowski's campaign does not bode well for Scott McAdams, the Democrat running in the race, it does marginalize Miller and leave him in second place.

I am no Lisa Murkowski fan, but I confess this anyway. I will enjoy shoving these arrogant, presumptuous, even contemptuous tweets in his face when he loses. Because it is so utterly entitled.