This site aggregates Arizona’s political blogs. If you would like to have your blog added to the list, contact site administrator Mark B. Evans at mevans@tucsoncitizen.com.
Your blog must allow RSS feeds.
For a list of all the blogs aggregated, see below.
Article source: Source
Over at MarketBeat, a bunch of Deal Journal pals have been live-blogging away on the jobs report, and they have all the full details and a whole bunch of reaction to the blow-away report.
But as an aside for Wall Streeters, the numbers for financial activities were down.
The number of jobs in financial activities were down 5%. That includes a 7.5% drop in finance and insurance, a 2% drop in commercial banking and a 2.9% drop in securities, commodity contracts and investments activities.
We have of course seen thousands of job layoffs and Wall Street in the dumps, so this isn’t all that surprising. But given the excitement around the rest of the jobs picture this morning, those numbers might sting extra hard today.
Article source: Source
Apple has created a PR nightmare for itself after threatening bloggers with legal action. The situation stems from Apple’s communication with a customer, where they are attempting to enforce a non-legally-binding email footer, demanding confidentiality to the email’s communication.
The problem lies in the fact that in one of the email messages sent from Apple’s support team, the legal disclaimer usually reserved for PR communication is appended to the message spelling out the steps to resolve the customer’s issue which has to do with the transfer of AppleCare from one device to another after repairs, a usually trivial affair that hit a snag and resulted in the customer posting about the experience on another blog in order to inform others and to try and see if any other Apple customers had gone through a similar situation.
While the original situation was ultimately resolved with AppleCare and subsequent follow up emails detail the resolution, the customer was sent another email from Apple’s legal department demanding that the customer delete the original post containing text from the email detailing AppleCare’s response to the original AppleCare transfer situation on the grounds that the text in the email was not meant for public consumption. The threatening email in question follows below:
Hello,
I am one of the policy representatives here at Apple. It came to our concern that our policy was broken. It is illegal to transmit information from voicemails, e-mails, transactions, etc, into public or private blogs and forums, vlogs, as well as documentation onto the internet, except for the proper authorities.
We have been informed that a conversation with a member of our Agreement Administration team has been posted on a blogging website.
We do view all e-mails that are sent to our departments for security reasons. “This transmission may be privileged and may contain confidential information intended only for the person(s) named above.
Any other distribution, retransmission, copying, or disclosure is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please delete this message from your system.” This is a very strict policy that we enforce, and that the government is under watch of. We do ask that you take down the posting of the conversation that you had which was posted on
“http://goinside.com/2012/01/26/warning-check-your-applecare-support-profile/” . If no compliance is made, further action will have to be forced upon.
You will have 24 hours to take the post down.
Typically, such legal disclaimers regarding dissemination of company information are applied to PR in order to pressure journalists into going along with the companies’ particular wishes concerning information on new products, services and events meant for press.
As the communication from Apple’s support was posted on the blog in order to add context to the situation and not meant to slander or libel the company, Apple has no legal standing to issue the takedown notice, especially as all other correspondence did not feature the legal disclaimer, making the initial communique an anomaly. Legal experts also agree that such legal boilerplate isn’t binding due to the fact that only one side set terms regarding the nature of the information presented and does not allow for negotiation.
With Apple attempting to intimidate bloggers into silence, this only adds to the bad PR the company has received in recent weeks stemming from factory audits and its responsibility as a corporate citizen coming into question after statements made regarding its position on American jobs.
You might also like…
Article source: Source
Around lunchtime, Romney and his wife, Ann, headed over to the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, a six-hundred-and-forty-five-foot tower, which, even in a town built on ostentation, is famous for its gaudiness. According to what the Donald says—and we all know how reliable that is—each one of its floor-to-ceiling windows is plated in twenty-four-carat gold. The hotel also features an eleven-thousand-square-foot spa, fifty penthouse suites that start at six hundred dollars a night, and a fancy restaurant bearing Trump’s initials.
Having spent the past year crisscrossing the country, the Romneys, who have been married for forty-two years, surely deserve a getaway break. Sad to report that they weren’t going to take advantage of the Trump International’s Bubbles Bliss February special, which invites its patrons to “celebrate the month of romance with an in-suite couples’ massage and bath therapy, chilled champagne, chocolate-dipped strawberries, and a Kama Sutra getaway gift.” (Packages start at $489.) Nor were the Romneys going to inquire about buying a condo in the part of the building devoted to full-time residences, although the proprietor would certainly have been happy to show them one. (Prices range from under two hundred thousand for a studio to $2.5 million for a three-bedroom apartment with four baths.)
Buoyed by a poll in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that shows Mitt leading Newt by twenty points two days ahead of Saturday’s caucus, the Romneys were going to attend what MSNBC’s Martin Bashir, with admirable British understatement, described as “the most significant moment of the twenty-first century.” Cable anchormen and political reporters love to whine about Trump and the “circus” atmosphere he creates with his repeated interventions in the serious business of electing a President, but that doesn’t stop them from showing his press conferences live, or, in the case of the Guardian, live-blogging the event beginning more than two hours before it starts.
Having spent more than thirty years hyping his own persona, Trump knows the news business better than most of its employees. He teed up this non-event by acting coy about whom exactly he would be endorsing. Was it going to be Newt, whom he greeted warmly at Trump Tower as recently as December? Or Mitt, who pointedly refused to attend the Newsmax debate that Trump was slated to moderate?
Anybody who thought that it might be Newt doesn’t know the author of “The Art of the Deal”: he doesn’t back losers. In a typically tasteful touch, Trump had adorned the stage with not one American flag but four. Confirming the old newsroom adage that nobody can beat him in the ten-yard dash to the nearest microphone, he spoke first. The Romneys stood stiffly to the side, looking rather like a couple of devout Mormons who’d gotten off on the wrong floor and found themselves at a swingers’ club.
For a minute or so, Trump sounded like he was auditioning for a spot on Romney’s economic team—or possibly running himself. Rubbishing the White House’s claims that things were getting better, he said he had it on good authority from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that by next January the unemployment rate would be back to nine per cent. (Actually, the C.B.O.’s new—and markedly pessimistic—forecast is for an unemployment rate of 8.9 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2012, but Trump’s figure wasn’t far off.)
I was beginning to think that Trump might have changed his mind and decided to launch his own third-party election bid after all, when a light went on in his head, and he remembered why he was there. “It’s my honor,” he said, “a real honor—to endorse Mitt Romney.” After the Romney supporters in the room stopped cheering, Trump went on: “He’s tough, he’s smart, he’s sharp. He’s not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country that we all love. So, Governor Romney, go out and get ‘em. You can do it.”
That ringing endorsement brought a genuine smile to Romney’s face. Trump even shook his hand without putting on a glove first, something he generally avoids, being a notorious germaphobe. Stepping up to the microphone, Romney still seemed a bit embarrassed to be there: “There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life,” he said. “This is one of them.” Then, realizing he should probably say something positive about Trump, he described his host as someone who creates jobs and hires people—evidently, he doesn’t watch “The Apprentice,” which, not entirely coincidentally, is due to start a new season in a couple of weeks—and somebody who isn’t afraid to say that China is cheating.
That got Mitt going on his standard stump speech, and he delivered a few lines about the country needing a president who stands up to cheaters, Obama being “in way over his head,” and so on. He also mentioned the foreclosure crisis and the fact he was seeking the endorsement of people who actually live in Nevada.
By then, though, it was too late. As so often before, Trump had dictated the story line and the headlines for this news cycle. Mitt’s campaign to save the middle class would have to wait for another day.
Photography by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images.
Article source: Source
Thanks to everyone—more than 200 of you—who packed the the Bertha Knight Landes Room at city hall last night for our tunnel debate, where both sides participated. Tunnel detractors Mayor Mike McGinn, City Council Member Mike O’Brien, and People’s Waterfront Coalition leader Cary Moon squared off against tunnel fans state Sen. Ed Murray, City Council Member Tom Rasmussen, and King County Labor Council Executive Secretary David Freiboth. (And special thanks to KIRO TV’s Essex Porter for doing an excellent job moderating the combative crew.)
Erica liveblogged the fireworks. The Stranger did too. And the Seattle Times has a big report this morning. The Seattle Channel videotaped it and is airing the debate several times this weekend.
The event was PubliCola’s debut town-hall-style debate, a series we’ll be rolling out regularly in the coming year (and hopefully, as PubliCola investor Rajeev Singh pointed out in his introduction last night, at spots other than City Hall where we can actually have booze). The goal for the series is to bring together the smarties on both sides of important yet contentious public policy issues and elevate discussions that are typically (and unfortunately) waged with sound bite grenades tossed from opposing bunkers into frank talks that seek solutions rather than casualties.
I don’t know that we eliminated the fusillades last night. Rasmussen, in particular, seemed to have undergone a personality change from mild-mannered bureaucrat to special forces operative, accusing mayor McGinn of breaking a campaign promise to work with the council to move forward on the tunnel (calling him a “ditherer”) and accusing him of being behind the latest initiative to stop the tunnel as part of his disingenuous agenda. During the audience QA, Rasmussen added that he would not wait for the public to vote on the initiative to protect the city from cost overruns before signing agreements with the state because it was just another part of McGinn’s agenda to stop the the project.
However, Freiboth and O’Brien—admittedly also part of the fireworks—did make an effort to peek out of their foxholes, both looking for common ground by edging toward what may be the only solution to the tunnel battle: Acknowledge that the project has serious problems and work to fix them rather than A) blindly moving forward with it or B) tossing it altogether.
Some quick “Best-ofs” from last night.
Best text message Fizz got during the debate:
Please tell me that one of the questions will be: “True or false: Seattle voters don’t count, except when they are the only ones who vote for gas tax increases.”
This, Fizz imagines, was an exasperated response to Sen. Murray’s insistence that the combined 14.5 cents gas tax, which is now generating $2.4 billion for the tunnel (“the biggest investment Olympia has ever made in Seattle”), an unprecedented voter-approved stimulus-style infrastructure spend that Murray led on, is being jeopardized by McGinn.
The point: Murray is ignoring the fact that while voters did support gas taxes for transportation projects in 2005, they specifically gave a thumbs down to the tunnel in 2007.
Biggest News
Sen. Murray acknowledged that Seattle is, in fact, on the hook for overruns and he said the senate had the votes to repeal the overruns provision.
Best tactical move of the evening
Fizz has to give this to our own Erica C. Barnett, who decided to seat Mayor McGinn and Council Member Rasmussen next to each other.
Best sound bite (Yeah, I know. Supposedly we don’t like them.)
Mayor McGinn: “Wake up and smell the recession” explaining that the state, currently facing a $4.6 billion shortfall, is not going to pay for any cost overruns on the tunnel.
Something we’ve never seen before
O’Brien lose his temper. The typically charming and collegial bike-riding, chicken-owning Fremont wonder boy was actually red in the face at night’s end, tangling with Sen. Murray in a back and forth about social justice dollars over public transportation dollars (some could argue they’re the same thing). In fact, the pair of Irishmen continued debating long after the crowd had gone home.
O’Brien and Murray continue the debate long after everyone else has gone home.
Biggest disappointment
At the end of the evening, Porter asked if anyone in the audience had changed their mind over the course of the debate. No one raised their hand.
We had been prepared to give an audience member Cola blogging rights over the next week to elaborate.
Nonetheless, this was an electric event. Thanks so much for packing city hall. We’ll take it as a sign that you want more of these, as we begin planning 2011.
In other news, Crown Hill resident Tom Nissley won another $23,201 last night on Jeopardy, bringing his total so far to about $70,000.
Article source: Source
