"...everybody talk about, pop music." Ahem. Anyway, holy moley, Riff, it's been an eventful week around central Europe and my sincerest apologies if you've been awaiting my latest update, wondering if I'm still alive or if I'd succumbed to a plague or a hostel that turned out to be a crazy movie torture prison or something. No, and no, everything's fine, but with barely enough time to sleep a few hours each night I'm afraid Riffing has slid a little on the priority list. Here's a quick recap.

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In a campaign season in which the Democratic candidates agree with each other on 95 percent of their policy proposals, Social Security stands out as an issue with a small but stark difference.

Here's the nut of the issue. Currently, Americans pays a Social Security tax on the first $97,500 of their income. If you make $60,000 a year, you pay tax on 100 percent of what you make. If you make $1 million a year, you pay tax on 9.75 percent of what you make. Barack Obama proposes lifting that $97,500 cap (which rises to $102,000 next year), while Hillary Clinton suggests it would raise taxes by too much.

Over on the Time blog Swampland, I found this incredibly helpful chart. I've stolen it because it breaks down the numbers exceptionally well. As a thank you, show Swampland some love.

Clinton is right about the rise in taxes: in some instances it is substantial. But only the rich will feel it.

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This just in: Mississippi senator Trent Lott is calling it quits after nearly 20 years in the Senate. He's not sick, just sick of the Senate apparently, but no word on his future plans. Perhaps he needs to devote more time to his lawsuit against State Farm, which is still refusing to pay the claim on his Katrina-damaged Pascagoula house.

Despite Lott's devotion to Strom Thurmond, in recent months, he's come off as one of the saner members of the GOP (he made early calls for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, for instance, and his dismay over the Bush administration's handling of Katrina prompted him to consider retiring a few years ago). His replacement, though, is likely to be more of a firebrand. Congressman Chip Pickering, who appears in the movie Borat, with a bunch of Pentacostal Christians cheering against the teachings of evolution, is the odds-on favorite to fill Lott's empty seat.

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A veteran of three White House national security teams spanning from Ford through Reagan, Columbia University's Gary Sick is not given to excessive flights of optimism. Experience would favor caution. While serving in the Carter administration, for instance, Sick was working as the principal White House aide on Iran during the 1979 Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, a trauma from which U.S.-Iranian relations has never recovered. But a recent analysis Sick has shared with a private list he runs on Persian Gulf affairs offers a hint of cautious optimism about recent, mostly below-the-radar developments between Washington and Tehran, especially on the Iran-in-Iraq front. Here's an excerpt, shared with permission:

Over the past several weeks, there has been a quiet process of apparent concessions and small gestures of approval between the United States and Iran in Iraq. General Petraeus told the Wall Street Journal that Iran "made promises at the highest levels of the Iranian government to the highest levels of the Iraqi government. These were unequivocal pledges to stop the funding, training, arming and directing of militia extremists in Iraq. It will be hugely significant to see if that's the case." Only a few weeks earlier, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had noted that the discovery and use of improvised explosive devices (IED) of suspected Iranian origin in Iraq had declined, along with the general decline of violence associated with the U.S. military surge and new counter-insurgency tactics.

In between these two announcements, the U.S. military released nine Iranians who had been arrested and held for many months. Even more unusual was the fact that the release of these men, now officially labeled of "no continued intelligence value," had been reviewed only a few months earlier and rejected. Stranger still, they were identified as members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its special intelligence division, the Qods Brigade, which had just been officially designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. Shortly thereafter, the Iraqi government announced that a fourth round of direct talks between the United States and Iran would take place in the near future.

So, what is going on here?

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