Month: March 2018
2018 State of the City address by Mayor Jonathan Rothschild
Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild (D) delivered his annual State of the City address today at the Tucson Metro Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Tucson Convention Center. Here’s the link to his website and his speech entitled “Tucson 20/20”: https://www.mayorrothschild.com/press-room/speeches/ Mayor Rothschild is a Democrat, first elected in 2011, re-elected in 2015. In his first … Read more
February jobs report exceeds expectations
Steve Benen has the February jobs report. Job growth soars in February, exceeding expectations:
Headed into this morning, most economic observers expected the new jobs report to show steady growth, with roughly 200,000 new jobs. As it turns out, the projections weren’t nearly optimistic enough.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the economy added 313,000 jobs in February, while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%, which is very low.
Just as encouraging, the revisions for the previous two months – December 2017 and January 2018 – were both up significantly, pointing to an additional 54,000 previously unreported jobs.
Before Donald Trump starts tweeting that these are record-breaking numbers, let’s note that while this is certainly the strongest report of his presidency, the nation topped 300,000 monthly jobs seven times in the Obama era: April 2011, January 2012, April 2014, June 2014, May 2015, and October 2015.
Also keep an eye on the Federal Reserve’s reaction to the new data. If the markets start to drop today, it’s probably because of fears of rising interest rates.
Social media killed the truth
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” – attributed to Mark Twain.
Ironically, he never said this. But Jonathan Swift did write “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”
A new study proves that lies (fake news) spread faster than truth. Robinson Meyer reports at The Atlantic, The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News:
It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study published Thursday in Science.
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”
The study has already prompted alarm from social scientists. “We must redesign our information ecosystem in the 21st century,” write a group of 16 political scientists and legal scholars in an essay also published Thursday in Science. They call for a new drive of interdisciplinary research “to reduce the spread of fake news and to address the underlying pathologies it has revealed.”
Kris Kobach and his ‘proof of citizenship’ law on trial
GOP voter suppression specialist, Kris Kobach, is unbelievably the Secretary of State of Kansas. He is the author of the so-called “Arizona Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act,” Prop. 200 in 2004, provisions of which require proof of citizenship to register to vote and presenting a photo I.D. to receive a ballot.
In 2012, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sitting en banc in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, held that the requirement to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote is invalid as preempted by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) — but the requirement to provide voter identification at the polling place is valid. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in a 7-2 decision, with Justice Antonin Scalia delivering the Court’s opinion, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that Arizona’s proof of citizenship requirement is preempted by the NVRA.
Kris Kobach had enacted a similar law in Kansas, the Kansas Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act in 2011.
The response of Kobach to the Supreme Court ruling, along with a series of hanger-on Arizona Secretaries of State, all Republicans, was to set up a dual voter registration system, one for the NVRA federal voter registration form which would allow citizens to vote only in federal races (denying them their right to vote in state and local races), and one for state voter registration forms, that require proof of citizenship, and allow voter to vote in all races and ballot measures.