ACCOUNTABILITY IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Flint water victims can’t sue the government. That’s another crime. “It is an understatement to say that Flint residents are in for some very tough times. But compare the pittance that they will get to the compensation that General Motors and Toyota crash victims received.”

Well, corporations are liable for the damage they do, unlike governments.

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey puts his muscle behind Tennessee higher education tuition freeze bill. “The Tuition Stability Act was filed earlier this month by Senate Education Committee Chairman Dolores Gresham, R-Somerville, and Rep. Martin Daniel, R-Knoxville. Gresham said the goal is slowing the pace of ever-increasing tuition rates at Tennessee’s public colleges and universities. . . . University of Tennessee system President Joe DiPietro said in a statement he wants tuition decisions to stay the way they are.”

RCP POLL AVERAGE: Big losers in Iowa from last week’s Trumpless GOP debate were Trump and Cruz. Only Rubio moved up, if that’s worth anything at this late date.

(Hat tip, Megan McArdle via Will Collier through Twitter.)

I LIKE THE FUNNY ACCENT HE USES FOR THIS: ‘Please Hold While I Send You Through To Mr. Gilmore,’ Says Jim Gilmore Inside Empty Campaign Office.

ROGER SIMON IS FEELING AND FLEEING THE BERN IN IOWA. Plus video of Bernie Sanders’ Supporters Getting Busted With Billionaire Backing:

Read and watch the whole thing.

THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: Billions spent, but fewer people are using public transportation in Southern California:

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the region’s largest carrier, lost more than 10% of its boardings from 2006 to 2015, a decline that appears to be accelerating. Despite a $9-billion investment in new light rail and subway lines, Metro now has fewer boardings than it did three decades ago, when buses were the county’s only transit option.

But still, look at all the potential for graft when building light rail, while burning taxpayer dollars in a fire, as the Cato Institute noted a decade ago: “A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.”

(H/T: Fellow Insta-blogger Virginia Postrel.)

DEMS IN CONFLICT: A more agitated Sanders tries to fend off attacks of nervous establishment.

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders pulled up to a supporter’s garage in his hulking campaign bus, prepared to give a pep talk to a few dozen devotees who had been tirelessly knocking on doors for him in the final days before the Iowa caucuses.

But first he had something to get off his chest. Visibly agitated, Sanders teed off on a television ad being aired by his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, implying he’s on the wrong side of two key issues: gun control and women’s reproductive rights. . . .

With an Iowa win on Monday within reach, Sanders is suddenly running a gantlet of criticism from Clinton and her allies, many in the media and even President Obama, all of whom seem to have awakened to the looming reality that a 74-year-old self-described democratic socialist could, at the very least, damage the Democratic front-runner and turn her march to the party’s nomination into a long, costly slog. . . .

In recent days, he has fielded questions about whether his health plan is too fanciful, whether someone tagged with the “socialist” label can win a general election, whether someone of his age is fit to serve, whether he’s been a strong enough champion for women and whether he’s the person to protect Obama’s legacy.

All of it has pushed Sanders into a defensive, and political, crouch.

Then there’s the whole manufactured “BernieBro” issue.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Moody’s Withdraws Vermont Law School’s Ba1 Bond Rating.

All is proceeding as I have foretold.

ASHE SCHOW: Rand Paul brilliantly addresses Hillary Clinton’s Bill Clinton problem:

At the GOP debate on Thursday, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was asked if Bill Clinton’s past indiscretions were fair game against current Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

Paul said he didn’t blame Hillary for Bill’s behavior, saying that she wasn’t responsible for what Bill did while president. Paul did, however, suggest that what Bill did would ruin the career of any CEO in America.

“If what Bill Clinton did, any CEO in our country did with an intern… they would be fired,” Paul said, adding that not only would the CEO be fired, but he would not be able to find work again.

Hillary and her supporters claimed that Bill should not be a factor in deciding whether she should be president. The fact of the matter is that Hillary herself has made sexual assault an issue in her campaign, and it’s impossible to ignore that her husband has been accused of the crime.

To be fair though, it was Donald Trump who overnight turned Bill from an asset into a liability, by simply not being afraid to go on the attack. Other candidates are learning from this example, but they should have learned faster, or figured it out for themselves.

FACULTY AT TENNESSEE push back against legislature’s diversity oversight. As someone who once worked as a lobbyist, I don’t think they understand the correlation of forces here, or how they come across to the people who actually, you know, completely control their funding. I would offer my advice, but I don’t think it would be welcomed.

JOEL KOTKIN: Serfs up with California’s new feudalism.

California’s new conservatism, often misleadingly called progressivism, seeks to prevent change by discouraging everything – from the construction of new job-generating infrastructure to virtually any kind of family-friendly housing. The resulting ill-effects on the state’s enormous population of poor and near-poor – roughly-one third of households – have been profound, although widely celebrated by the state’s gentry class. . . .

At a time when twentysomething billionaires are being minted, largely in the Bay Area, California’s middle class is being hammered. The state now ranks third from the bottom, ahead of only New York and the District of Columbia, for the lowest homeownership rate, some 54 percent, a number that since 2009 has declined 5 percent more than the national average. The peasants, it appears, are expected to remain landless much longer, or be forced to leave the state.

Rather than a land of opportunity, our “new” California increasingly resembles a class-bound medieval society. The proportion of aggregate income taken by the top 1 percent is greatest in a couple of Californian metros, San Francisco and San Jose, as well as New York. California is the most unequal state when it comes to well-being, according to the report by Measure of America, which is a project of the Social Science Research Council.

These inequities clearly aren’t changing the state’s policy direction. Gov. Jerry Brown explains the state’s leading poverty rate as simply a reflection of how grand things are and California’s natural attractiveness. Poverty, he says, is “really the flip side of California’s incredible attractiveness and prosperity.” It’s a view not far from the old excuse espoused by British tories, that “the poor will always be with us.”

This inequality is being justified – and made worse – by attempts to turn California into a mecca for the most extreme measures to reduce greenhouse gases. Like a good medievalist, Brown blames this one phenomenon for virtually everything, from wildfires to the drought and mass migrations. Like a medieval cleric railing against sin, Brown seems somewhat unconcerned that his beloved “coercive power of the state” is also largely responsible for California’s high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values and the highest oil prices in the continental United States.

Once the beacon of opportunity, California is becoming a graveyard for middle-class aspiration, particularly among the young. In a recent survey of states where “the middle class is dying,” based on earning trajectories for middle-income cohorts, Business Insider ranked California first, with shrinking middle-class earnings and the third-highest proportion of wealth concentrated in the top 20 percent of residents.

In other words, it’s been fundamentally transformed.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE CALIFORNIA OF THE DARK AGES: “California is no place for the middle class,” VDH writes on the formerly Golden State, where now intead,  “the postmodern and the premodern are but a few miles apart.”

Read the whole thing.

CONTAINED: ISIS affiliate Boko Haram razes Nigerian village, burns children alive.

Nigerian radical Islamist group Boko Haram burnt children alive in its razing of the northwestern village of Dalori, officials said on Monday as the death toll rose to 86.

The group’s militants attacked the village, situated approximately five kilometers (three miles) from Boko Haram’s birthplace, the city of Maiduguri, on Saturday in an arson, shooting and suicide bomb attack.

Three female suicide bombers detonated explosives. The militants also attempted to storm a nearby refugee camp that is home to more than 25,000 people.

The first Nigerian soldiers to show up were unable to dislodge the killers because the Boko Haram “militants” were better armed.

DIEBOLD II: DIE BOLDER! Sanders campaign questions Clinton-backer Microsoft’s offer to count Iowa results.

Shades of 2004, when the lefty conspiracy theory du jour during the Bush-Kerry race involved voting machines by Diebold.

Or…2015! As I was finishing this post, I typed “Diebold and Bernie Sanders” into Google just to see what would come up, and found the denizens of lefty talk radio host Thom Hartmann’s message board asking last July, “Will Diebold Support Clinton Again?”

Perhaps they too could benefit from the sage advice of Hugh Hewitt a decade ago.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: ABA Proposal To Lift Ban On Academic Credit For Paid Externships Draws Heavy Faculty Opposition.

DISNEY EXECUTIVE: Yeah, we plan to engage in illegal racial segregation. “I guess this is life in America in 2016, that a top official of a public company can speak openly about using race as a decisive factor in hiring and not even get a follow-up question about it from the two reporters at the Wall Street Journal.” Fundamentally transformed.

WELL, WE’LL KNOW SOON ENOUGH: Will Ted Cruz Be Hurt by His Vote-Shaming Mailer? “Similar fliers were also mailed out during the 2012 presidential race to encourage potential voters to vote for Barack Obama, according to the Independent-Journal Review. Those mailers were also met with similar scrutiny” — though I don’t recall the DNC-MSM losing much sleep over them.

SALENA ZITO: Wanted: A party of moderate traditionalists.

In this election cycle, we’ve pretty much put the cart before the horse. We mock the folks flocking to Donald Trump, because we never acknowledged their frustrations.

The political class only seemed to notice people’s frustration this summer as both Trump and Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, began running circles around the establishment candidates.

Well, I’ve been reporting that frustration from locales across the country since 2005. (Yes, people have been building to this moment for 10 years.) A cursory look at the “wave” midterm election cycles from 2006 through 2014, the “change” presidential election of 2008, and the total realignment of state legislative majorities, provides sufficient evidence of America’s frustration with government.

This country’s political alignment is missing one thing, and it’s a big thing — a party that represents the moderately traditionalist values of the country’s majority.

America doesn’t need two secular, cosmopolitan parties.

But since our ruling class is astoundingly homogenous these days, that’s what we get.

ABOUT THAT MOSQUE OBAMA WILL BE VISITING…