Welcome to The Now

Nancy Pelosi has benefited from social media. It's safe to say that site like Daily Kos was a factor in her becoming Speaker of the House during the Bush Administration; in fact, the two entities are very simpatico. Well, Pelosi is once again Speaker, but the political landscape has changed. The anti-war (in Iraq and Afghanistan, specifically) crowd has evolved to a non-interventionist movement. Black people who saw Bush's indifference to Hurricane Katrina started talking about police brutality. Those struggling to makes ends meet have watched in astonishment as Democrats and Republicans in Congress joined Bush to bail out the banks, or shuddered as President Obama not only gave some of the Wall Street watchdogs promotions while Occupy Wall Street protesters where being pepper-sprayed and have now begun to embrace universal healthcare, a $15.00 minimum wage and student loan forgiveness.  The Real Base of the Democratic Party has moved left since Pelosi's first stint as...

Democratic Senator and presidential primary candidate Kamala Harris (who has recently rediscovered her roots just in time to banish Joe Biden into the Shadow Realm ) has recently offered a proposal designed to help potential black homeowners . But one piece to this puzzle has started to get some light shone on it: specifically the part where Harris says that credit scores should include rent, cell phone and utilities : There are an estimated 26 million people who are “credit invisible” and another 19 million who are said to have “unscorable” files, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These people don’t have enough bank or credit-union accounts to have a credit score by today’s standards. While the traditional FICO score, named after the Fair Isaac Corporation FICO, +0.31% mainly considers payments on debt such as credit cards, mortgages and auto loans, the credit scores have always been designed to consider telecommunications and utilities payments since the...