OK, all you leprechauns.

Here's a Riverdance quiz for you:

What's to love about two hours of joyous dancing, singing and hypnotically upbeat music of the highest quality?

Answer: Everything!!

The absolutely lovely production of Riverdance at the Palace tonight (Saturday) and tomorrow afternoon is worth every bit of the financial and geographical inconvenience it might cost you.

I admit to an intense passion for all things Irish. I've been there twice and recommend How the Irish Saved Civilization to all who'll will listen.

But there's a reason: the Emerald Isle has intense magic, especially when it comes to music and dance.

Riverdance has been around for a while. I did see the famous Michael Flately perform Lord of the Dance at the Ohio a few years ago. That was an awesome show, but this one is actually more enjoyable.

There is no more gorgeous theater on Earth than the Ohio. But the Palace offers a bit more intimacy.

A standard zigzag of political rhetoric went for a jaunt along Pennsylvania Avenue on Tuesday (Feb. 15) with a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at George Washington University. “Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people,” she declared. During the last few weeks, much has changed in the politics of the Middle East -- but not much has changed in the politics of Washington, where policymakers turn phrases on a dime.

The currency is doublespeak, antithetical to a single standard of human rights.

And so, the secretary of state condemns awful Iran, invoking “our sense of human dignity, the rights that flow from it and the principles that ground it.” But don’t hold your breath for any such condemnation of, say, Saudi Arabia -- surely an “awful” government that “routinely violates the rights of its people.”

It wasn’t long ago that Hosni Mubarak’s regime -- with all its repression and torture -- enjoyed high esteem and lavish praise in Washington. For Egyptians, the repression and torture went on; for the bipartisan savants running U.S. foreign policy, the suppression was good geopolitics.

In this age of supposedly fighting against rulers and on behalf of oppressed peoples, the Vietnam War offers an interesting case in which the U.S. policy was to avoid overthrowing the enemy government but to work hard to kill its people. To overthrow the government in Hanoi, it was feared, would draw China or Russia into the war, something the United States hoped to avoid. But destroying the nation ruled by Hanoi was expected to cause it to submit to U.S. rule.

The Afghanistan War, already the longest war in U.S. history, is another interesting case in that the demonic figure used to justify it, terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, was not the ruler of the country. He was someone who had spent time in the country, and in fact had been supported there by the United States in a war against the Soviet Union. He had allegedly planned the crimes of September 11, 2001, in part in Afghanistan. Other planning, we knew, had gone on in Europe and the United States. But it was Afghanistan that apparently needed to be punished for its role as host to this criminal.

In light of the recent big news stories, it was easy to miss the struggle over the need to protect Social Security from blows coming from the Republicans and the federal Fiscal Commission. This developing fight won a victory recently in President Obama’s State of the Union address.

The following is what leaders of the Alliance for Retired Americans (ARA), and others saw as the key language on Social Security from the State of the Union address;

“To put us on solid ground, we should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations. And we must do it without putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities, without slashing benefits for future retirees, and without subjecting American’s guaranteed income to the whims of the stock market.”

The danger of permitting the Egyptians democracy, rather than replacing a dictator with his (and our) torturer lies, let us be honest, not in the possibility that Egyptian politics will approach the religiosity of our own Republican Party, and not in the possibility that the civil liberties we have helped deny Egyptians for decades won't all be immediately established, and certainly not in the possibility that the Egyptians would commit collective suicide by attempting to attack the United States, but rather in the possibility that other peoples would be inspired to attempt self-rule as well, and -- more directly -- in the probability that Egypt would cease to uphold the collective punishment of the people of Gaza.