Didja hear 'bout the new mayor of Chicago? She's a black lesbian. Isn't that great IdPol news? Yeah, right.

What you might not know is that she's also a millionaire corporate lawyer who covered up racial discrimination by the Chicago police force.

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So primary season for 2020 has opened, and the first target is Bernie:

Has the fire Berned out?" the Boston Globe's Michael Levenson asks on the front page.

The state of play: "[A]s Sanders weighs another campaign, some say that even as he has moved the Democratic Party ideologically — pushing issues such as Medicare for all, free college tuition, and a $15 minimum wage into the mainstream — the party has moved past him personally."

Whenever the corporate media start saturation hagiography, I become suspicious. The non-stop lionizing of Anthony Bourdain is the latest instance that set off my dissatisfaction with the conventional narrative. For the record, I have watched some of Bourdain's stuff. I found him to be simultaneously arrogant and self-effacing, simultaneously leftish and rightish - an icon of the rebel consumer crowd that Thomas Franks pilloried so well in the 1990s. In short, To me, Bourdain was just another sardonic bit of consumerist froth with huge dollops of dishabille and attitude, which is so essential in our egocentric, look-at-me society.