A great win for Rafa Nadal at Flushing Meadows yesterday; a great Cold War movie with Connery a half-century before; and great news circulating on the possibility of defusing the crisis in Syria with an anti-embarrassment gift to Obama: “From Russia with Love.”

Incredibly, the question being asked this past weekend throughout the US media had been: will Americans’ representatives in Congress vote to support the president’s wish to punish Bashar al-Assad (Syria, really!), or will their votes follow their constituents’ wishes at home against armed intervention? Asking this question seems embarrassingly obscene, to both morality and democracy, and most of us cringe at the thought of these pusillanimous representatives and senators we have in Congress making such a decision.