Jane Harman was a "conservative Blue Dog Democrat", with Blue Dogs already being on the conservative side of Democrats. How are you asserting that she was radical?
The main page shouldn't be login-walled. I don't want to create an account just to find out what kind of content this community has and how active it is.
Google+ needs to do this. I follow Linus Torvals and some other big names in tech, and there are dozens of worthless comments on every single one of his posts.
"+1"
"Wow,,,,,,,,,,,"
"。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。"
Incredibly low signal-to-noise, which makes me not even want to look at the comments.