The White House announced last night a series of changes to travel and remittance policies with Cuba, that will allow more visitation and transfer of funds to the island 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

Immediately after taking power in Wisconsin, the Republican party has launched an effort to make it harder for people to vote, especially low income individuals who are the least likely to have drivers licenses. They are pushing for both a law and an amendment to the state Constitution to require a photo ID to vote.

The DOMA battle has moved to the US 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, and the DOJ has filed their brief. In short, the brief whines about the burdens a DOMA-less world would place on the federal government, and argues that things would be so much simpler if we just maintained the 1996 status quo until things shake out.

With logic like that, we’d never have Medicare, Medicaid, or marriages of couples from different racial backgrounds.

Stay classy, DOJ, as you argue from your position of privilege.

Jamie Dimon says they’re going to have to chase 5% of their customers away in response to limits Dodd-Frank put on the usurious rates banks charge merchants for each debit card transaction.

So much racially-connected synchronicity going on over in Wingnutville lately. Michael Steele, presiding over a midterm electoral romp by the Republicans in which the moderate GOP candidates that managed to survive the primaries outperformed the Tea Party endorsees by a three-to-one margin, was ousted as RNC chair by a teabagger-endorsed guy named Reince Priebus, the [...]

I’m a huge Jane Austen fan.

Pigs In Space from episode 502 of The Muppet Show with Loretta Swit substituting for the fired Miss Piggy, featuring the musical number Side By Side By Side/What Would We Do Without You.

Grab your popcorn, put your feet up on the coffee table, and try to keep the spitballs off the screen please. This is Late Late Night FireDogLake, where off topic is the topic … so dive in. What’s on your mind?

The message that we as a people can be better, that we can use our government to help achieve that — and that the best part of ourselves demands that we try — is one that transcends this election cycle and the next one. There’s a longer game to be played here, and all of us need to be part of it.

The supposed struggle between powerful know-it-all elitist critics and courageous corporate-sponsored common folk sure does sound familiar…

Never one to publicly back down, America’s half-governor, Sarah Palin, quietly scrubbed her web presence of images of the now infamous “gun sight” ad. Team Sarah first tried to excuse the targets as “surveyor’s symbols,” but also deleted the ad from the website of SarahPAC. . . or so they thought.