American Democracy Doomed?

With our politics so long polarized and government gridlocked, with our parties playing full-on "constitutional hardball", pushing the letter of the law to the breaking point, perverting the spirit of democracy, we are beginning to hear louder rumblings of despair over the future of our fair republic.

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America's constitutional democracy is going to collapse.

Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent. If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we're less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen.

-- Matthew Yglesias at Vox

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Iran's Nuclear Program

In a swirl of controversy, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made a speech before our Congress yesterday, in a strictly Republican arrangement, while the Obama administration is in the middle of sensitive negotiations with Iran over their nuclear program. The Republicans' and Netanyahu's move was a little too 'hardball', which is more common in our politics these days, but as Thomas Friedman remarks, everyone does share a concern about the prospect of a Middle East loaded up with nuclear bombs.

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Moreover, if Iran gets a bomb, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt would surely be tempted to do so as well, and, suddenly, you’d have a Middle East that is already full of sectarian proxy wars also full of nuclear weapons — with few of the deterrent safeguards you had during the Cold War between Washington and Moscow. There are actors in the Middle East for whom “mutual assured destruction” is an invitation to a party — not a system of mutual deterrence.

-- Thomas L. Friedman at The New York Times

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Sugar

During my monthly perusal of Sugar's Twitter, I came across another web-interview about her personal life, which also led to an old YouTube video of her at her one-time night club, Dasheekee. I wish I could get over her, but if it has not happened by now, ten years after she dropped me like a bad habit, I do not see when it will ever happen. I guess my life is not busy enough to crowd her out of my mind. Maybe if she got really fat, it might help.

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http://beyondthehandle.podomatic.com/entry/2015-03-02T19_45_42-08_00

"club daasheekee" (Watch on YouTube)

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