A few thoughts and links between housecleaning and backyard chores:

While not much a fan of Steely Dan, I always find it intriguing and interesting to learn the background of where hit songs: what the writers were thinking, what they were attempting to accomplish, etc., so this interview with Walter Becker and Donald Fagan discussing SD’s “Deacon Blues” is pretty fascinating.

The ESPN mini-documentary about President George W. Bush’s perfect first pitch strike linked to at Hot Air thrown at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series brought back some incredible memories. And Hot Air’s Allahpundit is right: maybe that was the last time this country was united around anything. Thanks in large part to Democrats and Barack Obama everything is now politicized to the point where you can’t even watch a normal night’s TV without having someone’s political agenda shoved down your throat. And, ironically and sadly, that’s especially the case at ESPN these days.

That Iran nuclear deal keeps looking worse every day, doesn’t it? My view is that very few times in politics does there arise an issue that is worth tossing all your chips on the political table. But the stakes are so high here that I’m with Townhall’s Guy Benson on this: the Republicans (and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell especially) should play the hardest of hard ball on this and halt all work in the Senate until the Democrats agree to break their filibuster preventing a vote on the deal:

Republicans hold a Senate majority, several prominent Democrats are with them, public opinion is heavily on their side, and they occupy the moral high ground. Use it. Shame Democrats for this action. Force them to vote to sustain this filibuster over and over again. Make them explain on television why their chamber has ground to a complete halt, and why they don’t believe Congress should have any say on the Iran deal. Shine a white, hot spotlight on this, day after day. Make Hillary Clinton defend them, too. And apply intense pressure to Democrats who’ve aired public misgivings about the filibuster, particularly Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Chris Coons of Delaware.

Enough of the niceties and gentleman’s club rules; this is too important an issue to allow politics-as-is to rule. Force the Democrats to show how they really feel about the deal. Republicans must get creative here and do everything they can to sabotage this deal.

The funny thing about all this is that I’m not (at least philosophically) against Iran getting a nuclear weapon – hell, Israel, Pakistan, India, and others have them. And people like Donald Trump are right in saying that the prospect of Iran getting nukes probably means that Saudi Arabia and Turkey will now start trying to aggressively attain them as well. But that doesn’t mean we should actively support Iran’s effort by standing idly by and unfreezing their assets. Political and financial pressure towards moderate regime change is what the US should be working towards, not helping the most extreme kind of extremists get the keys to the nuclear kingdom.

Sad to see Texas Governor Rick Perry drop out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination but he turned out to be a lousy candidate with lousy political instincts. If he had played the long game by sticking to issues and not attacking Donald Trump’s rise in the polls so personally (a tactic Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are taking) he might have worked his way into the top-tier down the line. I think he, Bobby Jindal (who will be next to drop out), and Scott Walker are learning a hard lesson about presidential politics: being a successful governor does not automatically make you qualified to be a player on the national stage.