In the hoopla since Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump for the presidency, it's been easy to forget that less than a year ago, there were more than two contenders for president. Since being tapped for the Democratic Party's outreach chair, however, Sen. Bernie Sanders has walked the walk that he promised at the end of his surprisingly successful candidacy. In his most recent appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show, Sanders announced his arm of the Democrats' new anti-Trump agenda, and it lives up to the "revolutionary" action he promised on the campaign trail.

In his first interview in 2017, Sanders expounded upon the new Democratic plan to hold a series of rallies across the country on Jan. 15 to oppose the Republican Party's plans to swiftly repeal the Affordable Care Act within the next year without offering a viable alternative. If followed through with, the move has the potential to leave tens of millions uninsured. In signature Sanders style, the Vermont senator not only offered a glimpse into his wealth of policy knowledge on the Republican budget and Trump's agenda, but also offered the kinds of actionable solutions that inspired so many to support him in his presidential bid.

During his time with Maddow, Sanders notes that the Jan. 15 rallies will be the first time in the party's history that they sponsored such grassroots events outside of the election cycle. To say that Sanders changed the party is an understatement — this bold organizational move might just be the push the party needs to tap into the millennial support base that propelled Sanders to his success as a candidate.

On Friday evening, The Washington Post reported that hackers affiliated with the Russian government had penetrated the United States electric grid by attacking a utility company in Vermont. The story was originally illustrated with an image of the headquarters of a Russian spy agency, which it alleged was behind the intrusion. Then, on Monday, the Post published a new story walking back its allegation of Russian interference. Now, it says, the internet traffic that raised the red flag may in fact have been harmless.

This weekend’s misinformation about the Vermont case was the result of leaks from government officials to the Post based on an initial report from the company, Burlington Electric Department. After the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security published a document with details about Russian cyber-operations and instructions about how to report suspicious online activity to appropriate federal agencies, Burlington Electric performed a scan of its networks. It found “suspicious internet traffic” related to a single computer on the network, which was not connected to the electric grid system, the company said in a statement, and shared that information with the authorities. The company also said that government officials told them of similar traffic elsewhere in the country, indicating that Burlington Electric wasn’t the specific target of a cyberattack.

Somewhere in the multi-step game of telephone between Burlington Electric, the federal government, and reporters at the Post, the relatively mundane details about the malicious activity on the company’s network ballooned into a Russian assault on the U.S. electrical grid.

According to a Bloomberg News report, draws attention to a company called HavenBrook Homes. The company is controlled by massive money manager Pacific Investment Management Co. For those lenders that lost their shirt in the crash, hedge funds, private equity companies and investment firms helped flip empty houses into rental properties.

In Georgia, companies like HavenBrook Homes are twice as likely to file for an eviction notice than a smaller owner. American Homes 4 Rent is another company known for quickly pulling triggers on evictions. The two companies serve them to a quarter of the homes they own, where others serve evictions to 15 percent of their properties, Bloomberg cites Ben Miller, a George State University professor that helped create a report. But Colony Starwood Homes is the winner, serving evictions for one-third of their homes.

While landlords were once mom and pop operations or run by small property management services, they’ve now become large-scale operations. They once turned a profit by foreclosing on homes but now they’re taking people to court to collect on rent or process evictions. The cost is a surprisingly low $85 in court costs and only $20 to have the person ejected. Some companies actively induce the evictions by moving extremely slow in making repairs. When renters withhold their rent as a result, the company moves to evict.

Bloomberg cites Atlanta’s Federal Reserve, which revealed their own research that shows landlords like this might be destabilizing the housing market in the state. Their research is based on 2015 court records that show hundreds of thousands of homes were snatched up by Wall Street companies. Evictions are also predominantly in poor neighborhoods and those known for being communities of color.

Until now. In a sign that tuition-free higher education could continue to expand in a more piecemeal fashion, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled a plan on Tuesday to offer tuition-free degrees at the state’s public colleges and universities for residents from families earning less than $125,000 a year.

The idea is significant in part because New York is home to the nation’s largest public-university system—serving some 440,000 students—and the plan, which will need to be approved by state lawmakers, could affect 940,000 families with college-age children, according to the governor’s office. What’s more, Cuomo—a Democrat—and other advocates hope that if New York successfully makes tuition-free college a statewide reality, then other states will follow.

Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main Democratic challenger during the presidential primaries and a vocal advocate of tuition-free public colleges, joined Cuomo, who is reported to be considering a run for president in 2020. The pair explained the proposal in remarks at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. The days when a person could graduate from high school and count on a well-paying manufacturing job “are over,” Sanders said. In the current economy, “you need a college education, if you’re going to compete.”

But speaking briefly after Cuomo, Sanders, who grew up in New York, said he hoped the announcement would serve as a message to the state’s children that, if they work hard, they will be able to get a college education regardless of how much their families earn. “That is a message that is going to provide hope and optimism to working-class families all across the state,” he said. If New York makes the proposal a reality, he predicted, other states will implement similar plans.

"The only way we're going to work with him is if he moves completely in our direction and abandons his Republican colleagues. That's not going to happen very often," the New York Democrat and incoming Senate minority leader told CNN's Dana Bash. "And I'm even less optimistic that any of that could happen seeing his Cabinet choices."

"Of course, I'd like to make a deal. If we could get together on immigration and have a path to citizenship. Just as I was happy to work with John McCain and Lindsey Graham, I'll be happy to work with Donald Trump," he said. "But he hasn't even ... come close to talking about that, so we're going to end up opposing him on those issues."

"My views are exactly the same as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Both of them have said -- both of them have said the same exact thing: If we can work with him and be true to our principles, we're not going to reject it," he said. "But overall, we're sticking to our principles. We're not compromising for its own sake."

"Our principles are going to be our guiding light," Schumer added.

“Many more Americans have considered themselves politically conservative than liberal since the early 1990s,” Gallup wrote. “That remained the case in 2016, when an average of 36 percent of U.S. adults throughout the year identified themselves as conservative and 25 percent as liberal. Yet that 11-point margin is half of what it was at its peak in 1996 and is down from 14 points only two years ago.”

The survey found that only 36 percent of Americans self-identified as conservative in 2016. This is down from 38 percent in 2014, 39 percent in 2012, and 40 percent in 2009. By contrast, 25 percent of Americans self-identified as liberal in 2016, which is up from 23 percent in 2014, 22 percent in 2012, and 21 percent in 2009.

“Most of the long-term change in Americans’ political views occurred after 2000 and can be explained by one overarching factor — an increasing likelihood of Democrats (including independents who lean Democratic) to self-identify as liberal,” Gallup writes. “Democratic liberal identification has increased by about one percentage point each year, from 30 percent in 2001 to 44 percent in 2016. As a result, liberalism now ranks as the top ideological group among Democrats.”

This finding may help shed light on the surprising success of Sen. Bernie Sanders in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Sanders’ campaign was fueled by his overwhelming support among voters who identified as independents rather than as Democrats; although the perception is that independents are more likely to be moderate, the Sanders independents tended to be to the left of his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, on a number of issues.

A new Financial Times story helps quantify the degree to which AirBnB is ripping off members of the public generally to the benefit of its suppliers and customers.

A significant source of AirBnB’s price advantage in the UK is tax gaming. Commercial properties pay a higher rate of tax than residential. Similarly, AirBnB hosts skirt charging VAT, since the tax applies only on businesses with more than £83,000 in annual revenue. VAT is applicable only to AirBnB’s booking and service charges.

Even though AirBnB has been making concessions to local governments and is collecting hotel and occupancy in more and more communities, but AirBnB users seldom pay the same charges as hotel operators. And the Financial Times analysis shows how much AirBnB depends on tax arbitrage in one of its biggest markets. And that’s before you get to the fact, as a tax maven pointed out, that AirBnB hosts in the US are likely to be under-reporting income.

The ability of AirBnB to operate at all is proof of the success of neoliberal indoctrination. Most communities have strict zoning laws. Renting out your home, even on a part-time basis, is a commercial activity. Most localities ignore violations of that distinction for businesses that don’t generate traffic, such as a bookkeeper or web designer working from their home. But one of the reasons for this distinction was to preserve the integrity of residential communities and keep transients out. But it seems that nothing is to stand in the way of rental extraction in the name of the sharing economy…even when the sharing consists of pilfering from the very communities that cut businesses like AirBnB slack that they do not deserve.

Many members of the Democratic Party establishment remain profoundly angry at Bernie Sanders and the leading supporters of his 2016 primary campaign. Conversely, many grassroots Sanders supporters remain profoundly angry at the leadership of the Democratic Party. Rehashing the origins of this situation would be pointless, but it hangs like a cloud over the race for chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Keith Ellison is the right choice for unity

Sanders anchored what amounts to a negative partisanship mass movement on an unprecedented scale. His campaign grew far larger than Dean’s ever did, despite even less support from party insiders. If that mass of people remains where they were throughout the 2016 election, they’ll be a potentially dangerous force that ends up undermining progressive politics despite itself. But if they can be brought inside the Democratic Party and turned into the kind of party regulars who vote in midterms and volunteer for local races, they’d be an extraordinarily powerful force.

Since what they want is, in some ways, different from what existing party leaders want, they’d also be a bit of a disruptive force. But ultimately both young insurgents and older establishmentarians are going to be happier with that disruptive force taking place inside the context of a party politics paradigm rather than on the sidelines.

There are, of course, a lot of objections you can raise to Ellison. And in the spirit of a political campaign, they’ve pretty much all been thrown at him.

People who think it’s obviously absurd to believe that a black Muslim from Minneapolis can help Democrats win white working class votes in the Midwest would probably be fascinated to hear about what a black guy from Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama managed to pull off.

To make a comeback, an out-of-power party needs a dose of good luck, unity of purpose, and to recruit strong candidates for midterm elections. Luck is in God’s hands, Ellison is the best choice to deliver unity, and recruiting a big-name candidate for what will unquestionably be a tough race would be an excellent down payment on the broader recruiting challenge. Given where the 2016 campaign ended up, Sanders and his faction of the Democratic Party clearly have something coming to them. A well-qualified Sanders ally who is willing to make it a full-time job at the head of the DNC is a reasonable ask, and if Democrats are smart they’ll give it to him.