Pete Buttigieg (boot-a-judge), the mayor of South Bend, Indiana who has announced an exploratory committee for a 2020 presidential bid, dug in on President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan while speaking at the Commonwealth Club San Francisco, calling it “not honest” in the way it deals with Americans’ disaffection with automation in the workforce.
What he said: There is a “false promise being peddled by this White House that the solution is just to turn back the clock …‘We’re gonna make America Great again?’ You know, what does that mean? It means ‘we’re going to stop the changes so you don’t have to change anything,’ and it’s not honest. You can't have honest politics that revolves around the word ‘again.’”
After a two-year hiatus, HBO's "Veep" is returning on Sunday, March 31, for its seventh and final run that’s said to be more uncomfortable, biting, absurdist and uncanny than ever, Flipboard's Mia Quagliarello writes for Axios.
The scene: Season 7 sees Selina Mayer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) on the campaign trail, running for president again. This time her challengers include her on-and-off-again flame Tom James (Hugh Laurie), staffer Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky)'s ex-boyfriend Buddy Calhoun (Matt Oberg), and the smarmy Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons).
2018 was the second-highest year for retirements of coal-fired power plants in the U.S. In the wake of plant closures, some communities are converting these facilities into production sites for lower-carbon energy sources.
Why it matters: Coal-fired plants have long been seen as economic boons for rural counties, despite the harmful effects of their pollution on local residents. Converting them can both mitigate job losses and help meet energy demands more sustainably.
Philippine journalist Maria Ressa was arrested at Manila's airport on Friday on securities fraud charges, another incident that watchdogs say is part of an ongoing attempt to silence her by the government of President Rodrigo Duterte, reports CNN.
Details: Ressa, a 2018 TIME Person of the Year who has faced multiple arrests on various charges, has reported extensively on Duterte's brutal war on drugs via her media company Rappler. The site's managing editor and 5 other former and current board members were also arrested earlier this week on similar charges.
U.S. companies are on pace to buy back more of their shares than they did during 2018's record binge, data shows, despite — or perhaps because of — mounting political opposition.
Why it matters: Companies are continuing to choose buying back their stock to reduce the number of shares outstanding and boost prices over investing in long-term capital and labor expenditures. Last year, companies spent more buying back their own stock than on capex for the first time since 2008, according to Citigroup.
In high schools across the U.S., a quiet movement is underway to better prepare students for a hazy new future of work in which graduates will vie for fast-changing jobs being transformed by increasingly capable machines.
Details: Breaking with traditional schooling, these new models emphasize capabilities over knowledge — with extra weight on interpersonal skills that appear likely to become ever more valuable.
While reporting this story about high schools that are rebooting themselves to better prepare students for future jobs, I visited Summit Shasta, a charter school in Daly City, Calif., just south of San Francisco.
There, I watched students in a science class assemble circuits and listened as English students read through a New York Times review before diving into a new book — Junot Diaz's "Oscar Wao."
The big picture: As they worked, whiteboards displayed the skill each activity emphasized, like explaining evidence or modeling difficult problems. These skills are among the dozens that students track through an online hub — something like a custom Trello or Asana for school.
A federally mandated minimum-wage increase seems like a long-shot with the GOP-held Senate, so a collection of states are stepping up to help spearhead the "Fight for $15" movement.
Why it matters: Years-long strikes and rallies across the country have paid off, and several states with Democratically-controlled legislatures and governorships have made it easier to institute such policies with the goal of lifting people out of poverty.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, head to head with Sean Hannity at 9pm, had an audience of 2.5 million on Monday that was 19% below her Nielsen average this year, AP reports. Viewers slipped to 2.3 million on Tuesday.
The other side: Hannity saw his audience soar Monday to 4 million, a 32% increase from his average. It fell to 3.57 million on Tuesday. Fox's Tucker Carlsonand Laura Ingraham topped their averages both days, while audiences were down for MSNBC and CNN.
The big picture: With that length, the Mueller report would follow the playbook of Ken Starr's 445-page report on former President Bill Clinton and the 567-page commission report on the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. But there are key differences in the structure of the reports — namely, their summaries.
Asset managers have been moving away from fixed income and towards alternatives in recent years, looking to generate higher returns. But in 2018 the best performing portfolios were those that did just the opposite, a survey released today from investment bank Natixis found.
What it means: The top-performing quartile of portfolios had a much higher allocation to bonds than the bottom quartile and about half the alternative allocation.
Johannes Gutenberg died in 1468, a little over a decade after inventing movable type. But he had already set in motion a gold rush-like frenzy of European entrepreneurs who flung open print shops to cash in on his technological earthquake.
Why it matters: We may be seeing the echoes of Gutenberg's printing fever in the political and social tumult all around us, Jeremiah Dittmar, the lead author of new research published by the London School of Economics, tells Axios.
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