Last Call For The American Disease Spreads North

Sometimes being neighbor to a bunch of, well, Americans, isn't so much fun.

Five people were killed and two critically injured in a school shooting in a remote part of Saskatchewan on Friday and a male suspect was in custody, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and police said.

Trudeau did not give a motivation for the shooting in La Loche, about 600 km (375 miles) north of the city of Saskatoon.

"Obviously this is every parent's worst nightmare," said Trudeau, who was in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum.

Mass shootings are relatively rare in Canada, which has stricter gun laws than the United States. With five dead, La Loche would be the country's worst school shooting since 14 college students were killed at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989.

The shooting occurred in the high school, called the Dene Building, and another location in Saskatchewan, Trudeau and Canadian police said. The school remained on lockdown and the total number injured is not yet known, police said.

Police took the suspect into custody outside the school and seized a gun.

La Loche acting Mayor Kevin Janvier told the Canadian Press the incident may have started at the suspect's home.

“I’m not 100 percent sure what’s actually happened but it started at home and ended at the school," Janvier said.

Among Canada’s provinces, Saskatchewan had the highest rate of police-reported family violence in 2014, double the national rate of 243 incidents per 100,000 people, according to a Statistics Canada report on Thursday.

We have what seems like weekly school shootings here in Gunmerica.  In a country like Canada, opening fire on students is still considered a horrible, shocking act, where one political party isn't spouting inane nonsense like "if only school personnel and students had guns to defend themselves!"

Here's hoping PM Trudeau can help keep Canada sane.

It Was A Monster Mash

TNR's Jeet Heer points out the irony in National Review devoting an entire issue to stopping Donald Trump's campaign, as the magazine is largely responsible for the rise of Trump's arrogant, white supremacist know-nothingism anyway.

Decades from now, when historians try to figure out the genealogy of Trumpism, they will have to pay careful attention to the pages of National Review in the 1980s and 1990s, when a crucial debate was being played out between neo-conservatives and paleo-conservatives. Although National Review ultimately sided with the neo-conservatives, it gave ample room to such paleo-conservative voices as Joseph Sobran, Peter Brimelow, John O’Sullivan, and Samuel T. Francis. Even after these writers were purged from the magazine, the white identity politics they argued for was taken up by other National Review writers, albeit in more muted and coded form. This paleo-con tradition created the idea of a politics centered around immigration restriction and a more robustly nationalist foreign policy (including trade policy). Many of these writers seeded the ideas that helped form the alt-right, which is the faction on the right that is most enthusiastic for Trump.

In truth, the relationship between National Review and Donald Trump is like that of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. Horror-stricken by what the monster is doing, Frankenstein might deny his own creation and say that it has a will of its own. But without Frankenstein, there is no monster. And without a conservative movement that fostered and indulged white identity politics, there is no Donald Trump.

And this is the vital point here that needs to be made: someone like Trump coming along and running as the unbridled, freely decoded agent of conservative Republican dog-whistle racism was always going to be seen as "someone who is brave enough to say what we're thinking" and be wildly popular among the "Well, I'm not racist but..." crowd, especially after America elected a black man to be President of the United States.

Trump, or someone like him, was absolutely inevitable.  And for National Review's all-star team of dipsticks, pretending they're against the rough beast they created slouching towards Washington is a bad joke on the rest of humanity.

Speaking of bad jokes...

Poor bastards don't even know.

Water We Waiting For In Flint, Con't

The New York Times analysis of the timeline of the decisions made by the city's emergency managers and by GOP Gov. Rick Snyder show nearly outright indifference to human life at best, and suggests letting citizens be poisoned indiscriminately in the name of cost-benefit analysis at worst.

A top aide to Michigan’s governor referred to people raising questions about the quality of Flint’s water as an “anti-everything group.” Other critics were accused of turning complaints about water into a “political football.” And worrisome findings about lead by a concerned pediatrician were dismissed as “data,” in quotes. 

That view of how the administration of Gov. Rick Snyder initially dealt with the water crisis in the poverty-stricken, black-majority city of Flint emerged from 274 pages of emails, made public by the governor on Wednesday. 

The correspondence records mounting complaints by the public and elected officials, as well as growing irritation by state officials over the reluctance to accept their assurances. 

It was not until late in 2015, after months of complaints, that state officials finally conceded what critics had been contending: that Flint was in the midst of a major public health emergency, as tap water pouring into families’ homes contained enough lead to show up in the blood of dozens of people in the city. Even small amounts of lead could cause lasting health and developmental problems in children.

And the email records that Snyder has released are a redacted mess.

The emails were released late in the day, after Mr. Snyder’s State of the State address Tuesday night in which he profusely apologized to the residents of Flint and promised to help remedy the problem and get to the bottom of how it occurred. The Michigan House on Wednesday approved $28 million requested by the governor to assist the city. 

Though Mr. Snyder issued the emails as part of an effort to reveal the administration’s transparency on the matter, the documents provide a glimpse of state leaders who were at times dismissive of the concerns of residents, seemed eager to place responsibility with local government and, even as the scientific testing was hinting at a larger problem, were reluctant to acknowledge it. 

The messages show that from the moment Flint decided to draw its water from a new source, the Flint River, officials were discounting concerns about its quality and celebrating a change meant to save the cash-starved city millions of dollars. From 2011 to 2015, Flint was in state receivership, its finances controlled by a succession of four emergency managers appointed by Mr. Snyder’s administration. 

That upbeat mood lasted for months, even as residents began complaining about the new water’s foul odor, odd color and strange health effects, and began showing up at events with “jugs of brownish water.”

It's amazing what happens when you take control of government, and make sure it doesn't work, then surprise, government doesn't work.  It's so bad that even House Republicans  want a little chat with him.

A U.S. House committee is expected to hold a hearing Wednesday, Feb. 3, on the Flint water crisis and the government’s response to high lead levels in drinking water there, U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence’s office said Thursday. 

And Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who has apologized for the state’s handling of reports of high lead levels in Flint’s drinking water after it switched to the Flint River as its water source, is expected to be among those invited to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Yep, it's the Rep. Jason Chaffetz show, but I'm betting Ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings has a few choice words too.

StupidiNews!

• A major winter storm will drop heavy snow from Little Rock to New York City, with Washington DC and Baltimore forecast to get near-record totals of over two feet.
• Former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw has received the maximum sentence for his multiple 2015 convictions of raping black women while on duty, 263 years in prison.
• A labor board court judge has found Wal-Mart guilty of unlawful retaliation against striking employees in 2013, and has been ordered to reinstate 16 dismissed workers. 
• Global stocks are rebounding on news that European Central Bank head Mario Draghi would consider boosting the Euro in March, pushing oil and stocks sharply higher.
• California has seen a 2.5% boost in vaccination rates in Kindergartners ahead of the state law ending opting out of vaccinations for personal reasons starting in July.

Last Call For A Breath Of Fresh Air

Somewhere deep in GOP territory, Republicans are crying their eyes out.

A U.S. federal court on Thursday rejected a bid by 27 states to block the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of its strategy to combat climate change by reducing carbon emissions from power plants. 

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a brief order denying an application seeking to stay the rule while litigation continues. 

The states, led by West Virginia, and several major business groups in October launched the legal challenges seeking to block the Obama administration's proposal to curb carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. 

More than a dozen other states and the National League of Cities, which represents more than 19,000 U.S. cities, filed court papers backing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's rule. 

The regulation aims to lower emissions from the country's power plants by 2030 to 32 percent below 2005 emissions levels.

The court action means the regulation remains in place but it is not the final word in the legal fight. The appeals court still has to hear oral arguments and decide whether the regulation is lawful.

So for now, the rules remain in place.  Whether or not red states will comply with them is another story.  You can bet here in Kentucky for example that compliance will never happen under a Bevin administration, so it may be a moot point anyway.

Should the GOP win in November, it won't matter anyway.

The Lesson Of Detroit

Detroit's public schools are in such bad shape right now that schools are literally falling apart as students huddle inside, teachers are organizing sick-outs to call attention to the disaster, and the entire district may be out of money by April.  How did it get this bad?  Ask Gov. Rick Snyder, who "rescued" Detroit with his emergency manager program.

In Kathy Aaron’s decrepit public school, the heat fills the air with a moldy, rancid odor. Cockroaches, some three inches long, scuttle about until they are squashed by a student who volunteers for the task. Water drips from a leaky roof onto the gymnasium floor.

“We have rodents out in the middle of the day,” said Ms. Aaron, a teacher of 18 years. “Like they’re coming to class.”

Detroit’s public schools are a daily shock to the senses, run down after years of neglect and mismanagement, while failing academically and teetering on the edge of financial collapse. On Wednesday, teachers again protested the conditions, calling in sick en masse and forcing a shutdown of most of the city’s almost 100 schools.

As Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, grapples with the crisis in Flint, where residents have been poisoned by the local water supply under a state-appointed emergency manager, he has also had to confront the emergency here, another poor, largely African-American city with a problem that has also festered under state control.

Things have become so bad, district officials say, that the Detroit public school system could be insolvent by April.

“They’re in need of a transformational change,” Mr. Snyder, a Republican, acknowledged in his State of the State speech Tuesday. “Too many schools are failing at their central task. Not all Detroit students are getting the education they deserve.”

Many worry that the state of the schools will hamper Detroit’s recovery from bankruptcy, a recovery evident in the new loft-style townhouses and the bustling Whole Foods that Ms. Aaron passes near her school, where she teaches fifth grade.

Residents wonder how the city can ever recoup its lost population and attract young families if the public schools are in abysmal shape.

“As we begin to rebuild this city and we’re seeing money and development moving in, people are understanding that there is no way we can improve Detroit without a strong educational system,” said Mary Sheffield, a native of Detroit and a City Council member. “We have businesses and restaurants and arenas, but our schools are falling apart and our children are uneducated. There is no Detroit without good schools.”

But understand that this unacceptable state of disintegrating, infested, unsafe schools was always the plan, coming from a system starved for years and a largely black populace abandoned by a Republican governor.  It will take money, lots of money, to fix these schools and Michigan, like nearly every other Midwestern or Southern red state, is too involved in a race to the bottom to see how badly they can make government work and still get away with it.

Water, schools, roads, this is what happens when you put Republicans in charge and give them a mandate to drown government services in the austerity bathtub, and it's taking largely black communities to be drowned along with it. Snyder's emergency manager law was designed to cull those who don't matter to Republicans and their voters, and people are starting to take notice.

Five years ago, Snyder signed legislation that expanded the reasons why the state could choose to appoint a municipal emergency manager, then granted those appointees almost complete power over their assigned municipalities. Under Public Act 4, as it was called, state-appointed emergency managers could break collective bargaining agreements, fire elected officials and determine their salaries, and privatize or sell public assets.”We can’t stand by and watch schools fail, water shut off, or police protection disappear,” the governor said in a statement defending the emergency management law. “Without the emergency manager law, there is precious little that can be done to prevent those kinds of nightmare scenarios. But with it, we can take positive action on behalf of the people to quickly avert a crisis.”

Emergency management is a way to short-circuit democracy when a city faces financial insolvency, with the idea that a leader free from accountability to voters can make unpopular but necessary decisions. But Michigan voters rejected that law in a state-wide referendum, as many unions and civil rights groups raised alarm that this new breed of emergency managers could break union contracts and usurp local governance. A month later, the state legislature passed a replacement law that made minor adjustments and one major one: an appropriation banning a referendum on the new law. That was 2012.

By 2013, six Michigan cities—and almost half of the state’s African-American population—were under emergency management. In many of these cities, public services were pared down to the minimum. Pontiac’s emergency manager whittled the city’s employees to around 10% of their previous number, outsourcing almost every city service down to its cemetery workers. In an exit interview with Michigan Radio before the Flint water crisis reached its zenith, Flint’s fourth and final emergency manager, Jerry Ambrose, reflected on the limited city that emergency managers had left behind. “There’s just a point in time there’s just not enough gas in the tank. There’s just not enough revenue from the local taxpayers to solve the problems that are here,” he said. “Whether the city’s here or not, people will be here. And they’re going to have some basic needs that have to be met, one way or another.”

Detroit, Flint, other black communities were put under emergency management in order to be treated like numbers on a ledger and not human beings with basic rights. This is the result that they were always going to get, because this was always the plan.

 

Laugh-A-Trumpics

This WIN THE MORNING article on "black people will vote for Trump!" is the funniest thing I think I've read in weeks.

If Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States, there will be plenty of surprises along the way. One of the biggest will be the help he gets from black voters. 

According to Republican pollsters and Trump’s allies, the GOP poll-leader — who has been dogged by accusations of racism, most recently for tweeting out a chart that exaggerated the share of murders committed by blacks — is poised to out-perform with this demographic group in a general-election matchup with Hillary Clinton.

“If he were the Republican nominee he would get the highest percentage of black votes since Ronald Reagan in 1980,” said Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz, referring to the year Reagan won 14 percent of that bloc of voters. “They listen to him. They find him fascinating, and in all the groups I have done, I have found Obama voters, they could’ve voted for Obama twice, but if they’re African-American they would consider Trump.” 

Another longtime Republican pollster and veteran of multiple presidential campaigns has tested Trump’s appeal to blacks and Hispanics and come to the same conclusion. “He behaves in a way that most minorities would not expect a billionaire to behave,” explained the pollster, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships within the party. “He’s not a white-bread socialite kind of guy.”

Wow, holy balls.  I mean really? Black voters are going to abandon Hillary for Donald Trump? C'mon, tell me another one.

There’s more. The rest of Trump’s path to general-election victory, as laid out to POLITICO by pollsters, his campaign and his former advisers, looks like this: After winning the nomination on the first ballot, Trump unifies the party he has fractured behind him and reinvents himself as a pragmatic businessman and family man at the Republican National Convention. News of small-scale terror plots on American soil, foiled or successful, keep voters in a state of anxiety. Trump minimizes his losses with Hispanics by running Spanish-language ads highlighting his support for a strong military and take-charge entrepreneurial attitude, especially in the Miami and Orlando media markets. He draws the starkest possible outsider-insider contrast with Hillary Clinton and successfully tars her with her husband’s sexual history.

This Ben Schreckinger dude needs to lay off the meth and peyote highballs.  Never mind that this year's GOP primary has made black voters massively unhappy with Republicans.

Look, it's not impossible that Donald Trump wins.  It's just, as Douglas Adams said, finitely improbable. Even with Moose Lady's help.

Nice of Republicans to point out however that Hillary Clinton might need to do a better job not taking the black vote for granted.

StupidiNews!

• Astronomers believe there's strong evidence that a ninth planet far beyond Pluto's orbit may exist, so far out that it may take 20,000 year to orbit the Sun.
• A new report finds the grand jury in Cleveland who refused to indict two police officers in the death of Tamir Rice never actually got as far as an up-or-down vote on criminal charges.
• A British inquiry into the 2006 death of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvineko in London found that Russian President Vladimir Putin "probably" approved the murder of the outspoken critic.
• NOAA data analysis found that 2015 was the warmest year globally since record-keeping began in 1880, beating 2014's record by nearly a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit.
• General Motors is testing its own ride-sharing service in Michigan called Maven, which will allow users to arrange rides and even rent vehicles.

Last Call For Immigration Deliberation

As expected, the Supreme Court will take up President Obama's executive actions on immigration this year, meaning it will become a major election issue starting in June.

The Supreme Court said Tuesday that it would consider a legal challenge to President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s immigration rules. The court, which has twice rejected challenges to Mr. Obama’s health care law, will now determine the fate of one of his most far-reaching executive actions. 

Fourteen months ago, Mr. Obama ordered the creation of a program intended to allow as many as five million illegal immigrants who are the parents of citizens or of lawful permanent residents to apply for a program sparing them from deportation and providing them work permits. The program was called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA. 

The president has said the program was the result of years of frustration with Republicans in Congress who had repeatedly refused to support bipartisan Senate legislation to update immigration laws. In an Oval Office address just before Thanksgiving in 2014, Mr. Obama excoriated Republicans for refusing to cooperate and told millions of illegal immigrants, “You can come out of the shadows.” 

But the president’s promise has gone unfulfilled. A coalition of 26 states, led by the attorney general in Texas, a Republican, quickly filed a lawsuit accusing the president of ignoring federal procedures for changing rules and of abusing the power of his office by sidestepping Congress. 

In February, Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, Tex., entered a preliminary injunction shutting down the program while the legal case proceeded. The government appealed, and on Nov. 9 a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, affirmed the injunction. 

If the Supreme Court upholds Mr. Obama’s actions, the White House has vowed to move quickly to set up the DAPA program and begin enrolling immigrants before his successor takes over early next year. Democratic presidential candidates have said they will continue the program, but most of the Republicans in the race have vowed to dismantle it and redouble immigration enforcement.

For those of you who are thinking that SCOTUS would not deliver a body blow to executive branch power, recall last year's decision that effectively ended two centuries of presidential cabinet recess appointments, and has allowed Republicans to block filling executive positions until the president leaves office.

We'll see how oral arguments go, but I don't have too much hope here, not with this court.  The one bright spot will be heavy pressure on the next Congress to solve immigration, and a clear delineation between Republicans and Democrats.  Unfortunately, nothing will happen on immigration until Democrats get back control of Capitol Hill.

Water We Waiting For In Flint

As President Obama is in Michigan this week, the water crisis in Flint continues and a lot of fingers are being pointed. Flint resident Conner Coyne writes in Vox about what the media has gotten wrong about the situation in the city, and that the reality is that the stage for the humanitarian disaster here was set with the election of GOP Gov. Rick Snyder.

Many national media reports would have you believe that the crisis began in April 2014, when the city started drawing its water from the Flint River. They'd also have you believe that the crisis was the fault of the locally elected officials who made a catastrophic decision, not to mention city residents who did not hold their leaders accountable. 

The stage was set on March 16, 2011, when Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed Public Act 4. This measure broadened an earlier law that provided an "emergency financial manager" for financially distressed cities and school districts. Under the new law, "emergency financial managers" became "emergency managers" with the power to cancel or renegotiate city contracts, liquidate assets, suspend local government, unilaterally draft policy, and even disincorporate. (It is worth noting that Michigan emergency managers have done all of these things except disincorporate, which was entertained by a manager in the city of Pontiac.) 

The need for an emergency manager was determined by a series of highly subjective criteria. Almost every city that got one was a poor, African-American-majority city devastated by a shrinking industrial sector: Flint, Pontiac, Detroit, Highland Park, Benton Harbor, and so on. 

Flint was one of the first cities to be assigned an emergency manager in 2011, and over the course of four years had four such managers. One of the first manager's first acts was to suspend local government, and this remained essentially in force until the departure of the last emergency manager in 2015. Even today, Flint is under the scrutiny of a "transition advisory board" that has veto power over any local decision, and that has frequently overstepped its professed limited mandate to assure fiscal restraint. 

Many Michiganders found Public Act 4 to be a violation of a strong state tradition of "home rule," and so overturned it by referendum in the 2012 election. But that didn't last long: the Republican-dominated state legislature immediately passed Public Act 436, which was almost identical, although it included a provision to pay the emergency managers from state coffers rather than local. Under Michigan law, a bill that includes an appropriation like this cannot be voided through referendum. 

Some emergency managers, true, delegated limited responsibilities to the mayor or to members of the city council, but they always retained (and used) their powers to void any decision with which they disagreed. This is the key point that early coverage by flagship newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post neglected to mention: From 2011 to 2015, Flint officials had noreal control over municipal policy.
For example, a Newsweek article from October 2015 was titled "Flint: The Cheapskate City That Poisoned Its Children." 

A New York Times article reports that "Flint's mayor, Dayne Walling ... had attended a 2014 event to celebrate the switch to the new water supply," without mentioning that the emergency manager who had actually signed on for the switch was also present at that event. 

A Washington Post article from last December doesn't even utter the words "emergency Manager." 

It's those two words — "emergency manager" — that differentiate Flint from all but a handful of cities around the country, and which made it particularly vulnerable to the kind of reckless oversight that led to our contaminated water.

Chris Savage and our good friends over at Eclectablog have been covering Michigan politics and Gov. Snyder's emergency manager disaster for years, so if you want to learn more about how Flint happened, it's a great place to start.

But let's understand that in the end, Gov. Snyder did this by putting an unelected and unaccountable emergency manager in place in Flint who chose to do this.

Still wondering who made the call to switch to Flint River water? Here is the key document, signed by the Gov's EM. pic.twitter.com/QHLMELNR9B

— Jeff Irwin (@JeffMIrwin) January 20, 2016

Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't

The "Women Are Too Stupid To Understand Telephone Conversations" bill in the Kentucky Senate has passed overwhelmingly, and will now go to the state House where it is expect to sail easily to Gov. Matt Bevin's desk.

Women in Kentucky must have a face-to-face meeting with a doctor at least 24 hours before having an abortion under a bill that cleared the state Senate on Tuesday.

The Republican-controlled chamber approved the bill 32-5. Kentucky law has required women meet with a doctor since 1998. But since then, many doctors have discussed the procedure with women on the phone. The new bill clarifies that patients must meet with doctors in person.

Kentucky has just two abortion clinics, one in Louisville and another in Lexington, the state's two largest cities.

"You can see, have better understanding, watch body language," Republican Senate President Robert Stivers said. "When you have that type of personal interaction, I think (it brings) more to light what the implications of the decision are."

The bill updates Kentucky's "informed consent law." But critics, including Derek Selznick with the American Civil Liberties Union, call it "forced delay," saying it creates "needless obstacles for women, especially burdening those that live outside of Louisville and Lexington."

Republican state Sen. Julie Raque Adams of Louisville, who sponsored the bill, said the bill does not add cost because "a woman does not need to travel outside of her own community" to receive the information.

Adams said the language of the bill allows a doctor to designate someone to represent him or her at the face-to-face meeting. For instance, she said, a doctor in Louisville could designate a social worker or nurse practitioner to meet with patients in distant counties.

Well, she didn't need to travel at all to have an informed consent conversation with her doctor before, because of this great invention called a "telephone".  Hell, these days you can take telephones with you because they are "mobile".  But, apparently, without visual body language cues, women are too stupid to make decisions.

Oh wait, these days you can have things called "teleconferences" to actually see your doctor when you are talking to them.  In fact, telemedicine to help doctors reach patients in states with a lot of rural patients, states like, say, Kentucky, is on the rise.

But apparently the subject of abortion infantilizes both physicians and patients so that technology readily available for decades doesn't work and the meeting must be in person.

The notion that this is a needless hoop for women tto jump through?  Of course not, a woman proposed the bill, silly!

Welcome to Bevinstan, where women are too stupid to be allowed to use the telephone.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/living/health-and-medicine/article55482095.html#storylink=cpy

StupidiNews!

• The Pakistani Taliban is claiming responsibility for an attack by gunmen on Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, Pakistan, 21 students and all four gunmen are reported dead.
• More than two dozen schools in New Jersey received bomb threats on Tuesday, forcing evacuations and lockdowns involving thousands of students.
• Former GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin has endorsed Donald Trump for President yesterday at a Trump rally at Iowa State University.
• UK unemployment has hit the lowest rate in a decade as Britain's jobless rate fell to 5.1%, prompting talk when, like the US, that the Bank of England will start raising interest rates.
• Computer security experts say Linux has a vulnerability that could give attackers root access to servers and Android devices, the vulnerability has existed since early 2013.

Last Call For The Robot Revolution

Whoever the next president is starting in 2017 will have to deal with the rise of office automation as millions of office jobs (and in particular pink-collar jobs) are replaced by technology over the next four years.

Are the robots coming to take our jobs? Advances in any tech that aids in automation always come with questions about the jobs they take versus the jobs they create, but the World Economic Forum warned in a report published on Monday that advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and other modern technologies are currently likely to lead to a net loss of 5.1 million jobs worldwide by the year 2020.

"Without urgent and targeted action today to manage the near-term transition and build a workforce with futureproof skills, governments will have to cope with ever-growing unemployment and inequality—and businesses with a shrinking consumer base," the report states in its introduction.

The workforce number estimate, which is based on surveys and data provided by 371 companies' chief HR officers worldwide (whose combined workforces include over 13 million employees in 15 "major, developed, and emerging economies"), includes numbers for different industries' gains and losses. The biggest loser, according to the WEF, will be in the office and administrative job sector to the tune of 4.76 million jobs—due to "a perfect storm of technological trends that have the potential to make many of [the job roles] redundant," the report states. Other fields with major expected losses include manufacturing and production (1.61 million) and construction and extraction (497,000).

It's not all bad news, all this new technology will mean new jobs, particularly in STEM fields.

Meanwhile, the report's authors believe that employment demand in the engineering and architecture sectors will see a big boost, as specialists will be needed "to create and manage advanced and automated production systems." Job numbers in the "computer and mathematical sector" will actually benefit from seemingly negative trends like geopolitical volatility and privacy concerns—meaning that bigger, out-of-touch companies will hire more data-crunching specialists so that they can adapt to modern disruptions.

On the technological side, the WEF's survey points to increased reliance on the cloud as the biggest driver of hiring change, as opposed to robotics—though respondents also believed that robots' impact on hiring trends won't really begin until 2018. On the demographic side, the survey's respondents cite flexible work environments as the most impactful trend, thanks to more advanced mobile technology access across the globe. This trend in particular is a major reason the report expects such a dive in office and administrative hiring.

And that's the key.  Mobile technology and the 24/7 workplace, combined with more and more companies going to telecommuting and flex-time, mean companies will expect an on-call workforce available anywhere, at any time, from any place.  Note too that the real caveat is "jobs lost by the 15 largest economies" and while that does include India and China, one has to wonder if that means telecommuting jobs will be offshored from those areas to countries not on that list, places like Central and South America, Central Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe, and the big one, Russia.

The other point is that these are going to be pink collar jobs, traditionally held by women. Drilling into the report, the places that the US is expected to lose jobs are in the Healthcare and Energy sectors with slight growth in the office sector, but it's China and Europe that will see these office jobs go the most, with big growth in India.

We'll see how this all shakes out in the end, but that's a healthy chunk of jobs worldwide that will go away and won't come back.

The Other Side: Berning Up The Charts

Republican pundits seem really, really interested in seeing Bernie Sanders as the Democratic candidate, the way our side seems very eager to see Donald Trump running for the GOP in 2016. John Podhoretz suddenly loves the guy after Sunday's debate.

On health care, Clinton seemed to walk into a trap. She found herself defending the charge made (by her daughter!) that Bernie Sanders would dismantle ObamaCare.

He made incredibly short work of that by saying that he voted for ObamaCare and simply wants it to be the opening step toward what he calls “Medicare For All” — meaning a single-payer government health care system.

Once again, the fact that Hillary wasn’t comfortable taking that idea on directly shows the weakness of her anti-populist approach. She would say only that to raise new health care ideas would open a can of worms in 2017 that would give Republicans a way to abolish ObamaCare.

That criticism makes no sense. After all, the scenario she was addressing would involve Sanders having been elected president and sitting in the White House — which would mean he would have veto authority over any such Republican action and that the country had decided in 2016 to move farther to the left in any case.

Sanders raised $37 million last quarter, more than Clinton did and with more individual donations than any candidate before him in American history. That has strengthened him as a candidate and it emboldened him as a debater.

Hillary’s defenders will doubtless be spinning frantically over the next few days, but anyone who says she won last night is either deluding themselves or trying to delude you.

Now, let's go over this here.  J-Pod seems to think Medicare for all is a winning hand for Bernie, and seems to believe his large number of individual donors makes him "strong" and emboldened".  He really wants Bernie Sanders to beat Hillary Clinton, someone he seems to think will soon be indicted by the FBI anyhow.

If all this strikes you as weird, backhanded, and just plain suspicious, there's a good reason for that, and as Martin Longman points out, trusting your instinct on Bernie's chances in the general may be a smart move.

So, what we’re seeing here is that Sanders might be able to win the Democratic nomination while bearing the socialist label, but that it’s not exactly a big plus for him. And we have little evidence to show that he’d find easy rowing in the general election.

I’m not sure that Gov. John Kasich is justified in being so confident that Sanders would lose all 50 states, but I also don’t think David Atkins is justified in his confidence that Sanders would do just fine and have no negative impact on down-ballot races.

I think Atkins wrote a well-reasoned piece, and I’m not going to rebut it in full here. What I will say is that Sanders hasn’t been put through the meat grinder yet. He may look more electable than Hillary in a couple of recent polls and his policies may poll well in the abstract, but that’s just preliminary data that should be encouraging to Sanders’ supporters but shouldn’t give anyone the idea that these questions have been settled.

Socialism is still a dirty word, even if it isn’t anywhere near as dirty as it used to be, and even if the post-Cold War kids aren’t conditioned against it. If Sanders is the nominee, the Republicans and their big business allies will spend north of a billion dollars trying to make “socialism” less popular than Windows Vista.

Maybe this anti-socialism campaign will have no more effect than Jeb Bush’s spending seems to have, but there is a difference. Jeb is one candidate in a crowded field, not the nominee facing off against a single Democratic opponent.

And, then, since political reporters never lose their jobs, most of them are old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and good James Bond movies. They think that they know what this country will and won’t tolerate, and it won’t tolerate socialism via Vermont.

I'd love to see Bernie win *if* he could pull off his agenda.  But unless we get a Dem House and 60 solid Dems in the Senate, it's going to get blocked.

And I see Republican really, really, really want Hillary to lose.  That tells me something.

Elegy For The Turned Out

It's not the "Trump Democrats" that should worry all of us in 2016, it's the folks who don't vote and see The Donald as their best chance yet of burning the whole system down and replacing it with authoritarianism.

Ted Wade hasn’t cared about politics enough to cast a vote in a U.S. presidential election for almost a quarter of a century, back when he supported Ross Perot’s independent candidacy in 1992.

But Republican Donald Trump's 2016 White House bid has motivated Wade to get involved and he plans to support the real estate mogul in Nevada’s nominating caucus next month. Trump is a "non-politician" who can fix the "chaos" in Washington, he says.

About one in 10 Americans who plan to cast a vote this election will do so for the first time in years, if ever, and Trump holds a decided edge with them, according to polling by Reuters/Ipsos. (tmsnrt.rs/1SgeLvi)

These voters offer Trump a pool of voters who could be decisive either in the Republican primaries or a general election. They could be crucial for Trump in early-voting states such as Iowa and South Carolina, where his nearest rival, Senator Ted Cruz, is putting pressure on Trump and enjoys a strong base of support with more traditionally conservative voters.

In Reuters/Ipsos polling from June to December 2015, 27.3 percent of these “new” voters said they would vote for Trump, higher than his poll numbers among independents and Republicans who regularly vote.

By way of comparison, Cruz captures just 3.4 percent of these voters. And Senator Marco Rubio of Florida snags only 4 percent.

“I’m tired of the chaos between Democrats and Republicans and want to give somebody a try who I think can make a difference,” said Wade of Trump.

The 51-year-old has already switched his affiliation from Democrat to Republican and even attended a Trump campaign event in Las Vegas. He has told his three older children to get involved in the elections, although he did not say whether he wanted them to vote for Trump.

Trump, the Republican front-runner, has made targeting “lost” voters such as Wade a focus of his campaign. His anti-immigrant rhetoric and protectionist trade proposals have helped him to fashion a message tailored to reach Americans alienated by the endless enmity between the political parties and who, because of declining economic prospects, may feel like neither party has done much for them.

Those "lost" voters who never trusted politicians but trust a dangerous demagogue like Trump? They know exactly what they want, and Trump has made it permissible to say again.