A new black newspaper in Tucson
The Vanguard is being put out by the local Black Chamber of Commerce with a 1000 print run, the AZ Daily Star says. The chamber’s president, Clarence Boykins, is the publisher.
Boykins, who said he put up the initial investment to start up the Vanguard, is publisher. He tapped Tucson freelance writer and editor Theda K. Rogers to be executive editor.
Boykins picked up the first 16-page edition, printed at Territorial Publishers, Friday and called it “a great beginning.”
He said the paper aims to improve communication for blacks who are dispersed around Southern Arizona, while increasing the understanding of black culture in the larger community.
6:00 AM
Two more compromising Arpaio stories
The Republic fired two shots across the bow of Joe Arpaio over the weekend.
The first contains the incredible contention that the country sheriff’s office leases cars to get to and from work for more than fifty deputies, including Arpaio himself. Maricopa is a large county and perks for the top officials might be warranted, but fifty seems extreme. The charges seem to average close to $800 a month per vehicle:
The office will lease 53 vehicles – mostly expensive new sedans, trucks and sport-utility vehicles – at a cost of more than $500,000 this fiscal year, which began July 1. During this time, more than 1,000 deputies and civilian employees are being forced to take seven unpaid furlough days to help balance the department’s budget.
The story doesn’t really dwell on the inappropriateness of so many people getting the perk. The reporters, Craig Harris and JJ Hensley, focus on where Arpaio gets the $500K from:
The money comes from cash and assets seized primarily during drug investigations. Under the state and federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, police agencies and prosecutors can keep confiscated cash and sell assets for money to be used for gang prevention, substance-abuse education and fighting numerous crimes.
Although there are guidelines, law-enforcement agencies have wide discretion in spending the money, and there is little oversight.
The second story detailed how an exec at the car-leasing company Arpaio uses has been a donor to his campaigns, as have members of her family:
Shirley Garner, in charge of leasing vehicles to the Sheriff’s Office, donated $390, the maximum amount, to his re-election campaign last year, records show. Through one of her other companies, $1,500 was donated to a political-action committee that supported Arpaio but is now under criminal investigation.
The story says her husband has donated to Arpaio as well.
6:00 AM
Phoenix scrapes the bottom of the Smartest Cities list
The Daily Beast, the HuffPost knock off headed up by Tina Brown, took a little initiative and had someone chart some of the data out there regarding intellectual life and American’s largest cities. The chief researcher, Clark Merrefield, took into account factors like non-fiction book sales, percentage of residents with college degrees, institutions of higher education and so forth.
The result is punishing for the Sun Belt in general and Phoenix in particular. Raleigh-Durham came in first, followed by the Bay Area, Boston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Denver.
Phoenix comes in at 49—barely, as the compiler gleefully points out, missing the bottom five of the 55 cities analyzed. Tucson’s at 34.
Here’s a graf describing some of the data:
[After weighting for population] we divided the criteria into two halves: Half for education, and half for intellectual environment. The education half encompassed how many residents had bachelor’s degrees (35 percent weighting) and graduate degrees (15 percent). No credit was given for “some college,” or “some grad school”—we rewarded those who finished the race. The intellectual environmental half had three subparts. First, we looked at nonfiction book sales (25 percent), as tracked by Nielsen BookScan, the nation’s leading provider of accurate point-of-sale data, which tracks roughly 300,000 titles each week. We focused on nonfiction as an imperfect proxy for intellectual vigor, because overall sales are dominated by fiction works that, while entertaining, aren’t always particularly thought-provoking. We also measured the ratio of institutions of higher education (15 percent), as defined by the federal government—different than just measuring college degrees, this acknowledges that universities don’t just churn out diplomas, but instead drive the intellectual vigor of cities. Finally, many studies link intelligence and political engagement, so we weighed this, too, as measured by the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots in the last presidential election (10 percent). (Our relatively small weighting acknowledges that numerous other local factors can affect turnout.)
Entire story here. The commentors raise some interesting points.
6:00 AM
Joe Arpaio's performance ...
… at a press conference yesterday found some reporters barely refraining from suggesting that the sheriff is getting out of control. The EVT:
“It’s all politics,” said Arpaio, who spent much of an afternoon news conference Tuesday wagging his finger, waving his arms and snarling at reporters.
Looks like the journos at today’s Joe Arpaio presser practically had to jump out of the way of the spittle flying forth from the sheriff’s kisser. As I suspected it would be, the whole show was an excuse for a tirade on the part of our spoiled lawman, a fit thrown by a puerile 77 year-old after someone took away his new toy and stuck him in a time out.
The Republic story, by contrast, doesn’t mention anything about Arpaio’s demeanor at the appearance. I can’t link to it because I can’t find it on the AZCentral site … it doesn’t come up when you search for Arpaio.
(I"m reading it off the rain-soaked terrestrial edition I got on my driveway this a.m. The Arizona Republic sucks at delivering the news in so many ways.)
The JJ Hensley story from before the press conference, however, has a weird little link to the right that gives you a slide show, apparently from the conference itself.
So I went to the AZCentral front page to hunt for it. A fiery Joe Arpaio press conference would be there somewhere, right?
I noticed a button for “”http://www.azcentral.com/news/“>Arizona News.” Aha! Here’s what I got:
Here’s a closeup of the story links:
Nepal … Anna Nicole Smith … Dinosaurs in France … and Saudi sex talk.
That’s Arizona news?
6:00 AM