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...

Very Interesting . First of all, there's the theory that Warren's main role is so siphon votes away from Sanders, which would hard to do (a) if they are on stage where people can compare them and (b) in light of Sander's awesome speech the other day . Of course, pitting Biden with Sanders could hurt Biden's chance of getting the True Base to even give him a decent look. And putting Biden and Warren together only to let Sanders be the star of the other night would be disastrous for every establishment Democrat out there. So the choice to pit Biden against Sanders makes me think the Shaft of the Democratic Party believes that Biden's lead is genuine ( Ha !) and enough to weather a Bernie Storm. Next, we have Tulsi Gabbard ( a person who makes Fox News shake in their boots ) in a group that are pushing sad Military Industrial Complex -friendly ideas . Gabbard is to foreign policy what Sanders is to economic policy, so unless the questions are all on the ...

Sen. Sanders talked about the history of Democratic Socialism in America, and why embracing it may be the best option for the country going forward .

h/t Secular Talk

So Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards signed a fetal heartbeat ( six weeks , BTW) bill into law. Normally, left-leaning Americans would go after Governor Edwards hard for this, as a majority of those who vote Democrat range from being pro-choice to supporting abortion under specific circumstances (rape, incest, health of the mother, etc.). But we live in the Age of Team Politics , where you can be as conservative as you want even if you're a Democrat, and other Democratic voters/supporters will bend over backwards to justify deviations from traditional positions. Websites that have been referenced here in the past are a good example of how Team Politics has shrouded ideological perspectives. The reactions/comments on  Daily Kos and Democratic Underground , for example, has mostly ranged from   this is the price we pay for being a big tent    and better a Democrat than a Republican (although DU has, to be fair, more willing to challenge the status quo )...

There was a time when those left-of-center considered compartmentalization, incrementalism and pragmatic politics of the Democratic Party to be an acceptable alternative to the staunch conservatism of the Republican Party (who decided, with each election cycle, that appealing to voters who where either misogynistic, racist, Islamophobic or a combination was a necessary evil). [Before I delve to deep in the rabbit hole here, let me say that the Republican Party is not 100% full or bigots, racists and misogynists. If anything, the GOP is the Party of Old Money and Oil Money. But they learned long ago that playing into a person's biases can help generate a pretty good voter turnout. In the same vein, the Democratic Party is not a bastion for racial minorities, women, LGBTQ, non-Christians, etc. If anything, The Democratic Party is the Party of New Money and Tech Money. They are more cordial to the non-WASP voter because, why let those votes go to a third party? Also, both parties ar...

From a little over two years ago :

As Secular Talk explains.

After his co-worker Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and chopped up and after Julian Assange was arrested , stalwart journalist Dana Milbank is woke...oh wait, no; it's because his White House credentials was revoked .