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The weekends on All Things Considered series Movies I've Seen A Million Times features filmmakers, actors, writers and directors talking about the movies that they never get tired of watching.

For rapper Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, a founding member of the rap group the Wu-Tang Clan and better known by his stage name RZA, the movie he could watch a million times is Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. RZA makes his directorial debut with The Man With the Iron Fists, which opened in theaters this weekend.

Joe Scarnici/FilmMagic

Actor-rapper-director RZA

Take it easy, tough guy.

Russian officials are acknowledging that President Vladimir Putin has been slowed by back problems, but they insist he won't be sidelined for long.

Rumors about an injury began to float in early September, when the Russian leader was seen wincing at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vladivostok.

A Kremlin spokesman said it's a minor injury, about what you'd expect in an athletic fellow like the 60-year-old Putin. Nonetheless, several overseas trips have been canceled.

There's no word on what the president may be using in terms of liniment, but it must be a bitter treatment for someone who has carefully cultivated his image as an all-around man of action.

Enlarge Ria Novosti/Reuters /Landov

Putin, who was prime minister at the time, rides a horse in southern Siberia's Tuva region on Aug. 3, 2009.

Dan Lungren has been in and out of public office since 1979. The Republican represented a Southern California district in the '80s, served as the state's attorney general for eight years, and then returned to Congress to represent the Sacramento area in 2004.

These days, he's still the same pro-business, limited-government conservative he's always been, Lungren told a friendly audience in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova.

"There's a reason people are leaving California [and] going to Texas, leaving California [and] going to Nevada, and it's not for the weather," he told the crowd. "So I make no apologies whatsoever that I am about more jobs, not more taxes!"

Money Pouring In

That message played well in the past when his district was slightly more conservative, but now Lungren finds himself with a big target on his back.

"Just to let you know, I was informed just before I came over here, more money has been spent against me in this race than any other candidate for Congress in the country," he said.

At least that was true when he gave the speech. Since then, other races have become more expensive. But it is true that Democrats and outside PACs have spent more than $4.5 million trying to defeat Lungren.

Enlarge Rich Pedroncelli/AP

Democrat Ami Bera is challenging Lungren. Bera ran against Lungren in 2004 and lost, but since the district was redrawn, the race has become competitive.

The last unemployment report before the election came out Friday, and the news was middling: Unemployment ticked up to 7.9 percent.

The private sector created more than 180,000 new jobs, but state and local governments resumed laying workers off. That discrepancy is part of a longer-term trend.

For a few years now, private sector employment has been growing, but since mid-2010, state and local governments have eliminated roughly half a million jobs.

"There's real consequences to these huge cuts in the public sector, for overall growth in the economy and for public services that we all need," says Sylvia Allegretto, labor market economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

She says close to 40 percent of the all public sector jobs losses have come in California.

"Class sizes are increasing because we had to lay off a ton of school K-12 teachers, our police department ... we had to lay off a lot of those officers, is struggling," she says.

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