After the “War on Drugs” the American shunning of Cuba, as if they aren’t right there 90 miles from Florida, has to be the stupidest, least effective and most childish foreign policy initiative we have pursued watched as it fails miserably.

It was time to end it 40 years ago but now’s as good a time as any.

It’s the kind of big, welcome, turning the battleship around, kind of news the Obama Admin, has been generating lately as the GOP takes control of D.C., the President slinks into irrelevancy and the media completely changes focus to the Jeb Bush vs. Hilary Clinton ultra-death match of 2016.

Waiting for the conservative meltdown about ending the failed policy in 3…2…1.

Meanwhile over in Russia, Sarah Palin’s best friend, “Shirtless” Vlad Putin, is suffering from the sanctions imposed after his impetuous Ukrainian adventure and the nose dive of global oil.

Putin, like most nationalist reptiles is never that easy to predict, and he could always use his formidable rhetorical bombast to turn these turns of events into further rallying cries against the west. But it’s hard to look back now at the RWNJ embrace of Putin over Ukraine (they said Obama was weak for not bombing Russia as they were extolling Putin’s virtues as a great bear wrestling leader) and the Obama-led sanctions as less than a quite successful foreign policy of restraint. Once again Obama is right and his detractors were incredibly wrong. Now wait for them to take credit for it.

Michael Tomasky says Dems should say good riddance to the South and let it go.

I think maybe the Founding Fathers were right when they thought the slave problem absolutely unsolvable, so they cut a deal and hoped for the best, kicking that horrific can down the road until nothing less than Civil War was necessary. My only question for Lincoln would have been “do we need the South, would we miss it?”

I am still a believer in the 50 state strategy, but not if we’re going to become Republican lite (“less filling, more hate”) like Mary Landrieu and compromise our core beliefs just to hold onto a few seats in the Old Confederacy.

But it’s not just a question of numbers. The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”

Cohen thinks maybe some economic populism could work, and that could be true in limited circumstances. But I think even that is out the window now. In the old days, drenched in racism as the South was, it was economically populist. Glass and Steagall, those eponymous bank regulators, were both Southern members of Congress. But today, as we learned in Sunday’s Times, state attorneys general, many in the South, are colluding with energy companies to fight federal regulation of energy plants.

Yeah, populism could work! If it doesn’t go along with a sell out women and minorities and the crucial secular values we’ve come to understand as America. That part’s kinda key.

His veto of the gestational crate bill is such craven political opportunism flying in the face of both the wishes of the people of NJ, and Christie’s own clearly bullshit statements that he’s all about the people of NJ first.

Mark Bittman makes the case gently.

Jon Stewart was less gentle

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/9cn7ye/porks-and-habitation