After last Novembers elections, the GOP had a bit of a revelation. Once they had gained control of the congress, bipartisanship suddenly became the mature and necessary thing to do. The people spoke, after all, and had given the go ahead for Republican’s to push through their ideology, and it was now the responsibility of the Democrats to play along. “Serious adults are in charge here and we intend to make progress,” said Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, with an air of superiority. Yes, this is the same fellow who made the following remark a few years back: “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.” It is also the same party that has fought bitterly against nearly every policy that President Obama has advocated, like health care reform, the economic stimulus, immigration reform, etc.

Of course its all nonsense. The GOP is about as interested in bipartisanship as Reagan was interested in a balanced budget. They say one thing, and do something entirely different. They are politicians, this is what they do.

But still, this does lead to a different question that has been floating around lately, which is whether the Democratic Party should be embracing the liberal movement, led by people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, or falling back to a more centrist plan that Bill Clinton embraced back in the ’90s. This question seems legitimate, but it actually is not.

Elizabeth Warren and the rising liberal movement have created a real fear within the Republican party and Wall Street. Certain right wing pundits paint Warren as nothing less than a radical socialist, aiming to overthrow the capitalist system. This is fear. Fear that the new liberal movement is not just a fad, and that the future is moving leftward.

The argument for centrism within the Democratic party is a distraction, but also a tactic. After all, what does centrism really mean in Washington? It means corporatism. It means the neoliberal alliance between Wall Street and D.C. that we have seen wreak havoc over the past 30 years. It means the Clinton administration signing financial deregulation into law, and refusing to regulate derivatives. It means the promotion of corporatist trade deals like NAFTA and the TPP.

Gawker Media founder and president Nick Denton now oversees the first unionized digital media company, and bucking the trend of many other company executives, he's just fine with it.

"Congratulations to you on a well-run campaign. And to the Gawker writers for a free discussion in our proudest tradition," Denton tweeted Thursday after the Writers Guild of America, East, AFL-CIO (WGAE), announced Gawker's editorial staff endorsed collective bargaining by a 3-to-1 margin.

Gawker's move to unionize "reflects concern that a lot of people in media have about the quality of jobs," Stephanie Luce, a professor of sociology and labor studies at City University of New York. The publisher of websites including Gawker, Jazebel, Deadspin, Gizmodo and Lifehacker has an editorial staff of 118 people, 107 of whom cast ballots, with 80 voting for and 27 voting against unionizing.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday called on Congress to immediately fund a million jobs for disadvantaged young Americans, adding to a pile of high-cost plans that might only become reality if he prevails in his longshot bid for the White House.

Sanders’s bill, which he introduced in a D.C. neighborhood with relatively high unemployment and crime rates, would send $5.5 billion to local and state governments to fund job-training programs. Much of the money would go to helping unemployed African Americans. Sanders suggested the investment could pay for itself if it keeps more young black men out of jail.

“If current trends continue, 1 in 3 black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. This is an unspeakable tragedy,” Sanders said. “But this crisis is not just a destruction of human life. It is also very, very costly to the taxpayers.” Sanders pegged the country’s annual prison tab at $70 billion.

“It makes a lot more sense to me to be investing in jobs, in job training . . . than to be building more and more jails and to be locking more and more people up,” Sanders said.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (WYMT) - Social Security Administration officials announced Thursday disability benefits for hundreds of Appalachian residents will be restored.

The S.S.A. last month suspended payments to about 900 former clients of Floyd County lawyer Eric C. Conn, who the government suspects of using fraudulent information to secure the benefits.

Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, met with high-ranking S.S.A. officials Wednesday afternoon.

"What my case to them was lift this suspension of these payments to everybody and then individually go through these cases one by one to find those that are fraudulent," Rogers said. "But in the meantime, don't punish the innocent."

The SSA had until 5 p.m. Thursday to respond to a motion filed on behalf of hundreds of people whose disability benefits were suspended, a federal judge ordered Wednesday.

A legal team headed by Prestonsburg attorney Ned Pillersdorf filed two lawsuits - one against the federal government and the other against Conn - in response to the suspensions.

Campaign aides for liberal warrior Bernie Sanders are scrambling to hire more staff in Iowa and open an Iowa office to keep up with momentum as each of his events attracts a crush of hundreds.

"People are out ahead and we're trying to play catch-up organizationally to give these people a vehicle to participate in the campaign," Sanders' campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, told The Des Moines Register on Thursday morning.

Sanders is the no-party Vermont U.S. senator who's running for president as a Democrat. His rebel yell calling for a revolution — he wants to fight economic inequality and wrest control of the government from millionaires — has brought Iowans running.

Sanders's crowd-attracting abilities are reminiscent of another revolution-rallying, white-haired grandfather-like figure who was also famous for stemwinders on big change for the federal government: Ron Paul, the Republican who finished in third place just 3 points behind the leaders in the 2012 Iowa caucuses.

WASHINGTON — Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments. But the documents also note that the N.S.A. sought to target hackers even when it could not establish any links to foreign powers.

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Jim Himes said Wednesday he will support President Obama's bid for fast-track authority to negotiate a new trade deal, a controversial decision that puts the fourth-term lawmaker at odds with the progressive and labor union elements in his Southwestern Connecticut district.

As one of a handful of undecided House Democrats crucial to passage of fast-track -- Trade Promotion Authority or TPA -- Himes has been the object of intense White House lobbying. He met Obama twice at the White House with other congressional undecideds and spoke to the president one-on-one on the phone.

A vote in the House could take place as early as next week.

Income inequality has gotten so bad in America that it's now easier to get ahead in many other countries, says Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Decades of deregulation and lowering taxes for the wealthy and businesses -- with the hope of it eventually benefiting the middle and working classes -- has created a chasm between the rich and everyone else, Stiglitz told CNNMoney.

To get back to a more equal society, he suggests we take a page from some of our European neighbors and restore the balance between government, business and labor.

"Maybe we should be calling the American Dream the Scandinavian Dream," he told CNNMoney.

The Scandinavian countries changed their education systems, social policies and legal frameworks to create societies where there is a higher degree of mobility. That made their countries more into the land of opportunity that America once was.