Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse - What does the presidential race look like nationally?

  Our presidential primary in the Heart of Dixie is less than two months away. We vote on March 3, 2020. President Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee. It is a foregone conclusion that Trump will carry Alabama in the November general election. 

  One of the most intriguing questions will be which Democratic presidential candidate will win the Alabama Democratic Primary. Longtime Democrat kingpin, Joe Reed, who heads the Alabama Democratic Conference, will have a lot to say about the outcome. It will be interesting to see how former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s late entry into the Democratic race for president fares. 

Ian M. MacIsaac: Why Occupy failed

  The Occupy movement rose over the desperate and disjointed American political landscape like a colossus in the late summer and early fall of 2011.

  From Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan--the home base of Occupy Wall Street--the movement spread to thousands of cities in America, as well as to foreign countries such as Greece, Germany, and Brazil.

  By September 2011, the movement seemed to be well on its way to making a permanent change in the American political narrative, with previously-unheard phrases like 'the 99 percent' becoming household terms and renewed scrutiny being placed on the extraordinary wealth of the top one percent. News coverage alone was sufficient to keep the movement at the forefront of Americans' political brains.