Thursday, January 30, 2020
In a power move worthy of Gordon Gekko, Alden Global Capital acquired a near six percent interest Wednesday in media rival, Lee Enterprises, after purchasing a $9.2 million stake in the company on the open market.
Alden’s subsidiary, MNG Holdings (DBA) Digital First Media reported purchasing 3.4 million shares to the Security and Exchange Commission at roughly $2.72 a share on Wednesday. By the final bell, Lee Enterprises stock closed at $2.11 a share.
The acquisition comes on the same day billionaire Warren Buffett announced he was selling his media empire, BH Media Group, to Lee Enterprises for $140 million, bringing 81 dailies under their control. Lee Enterprises currently owns 46 newspapers, including The Arizona Daily Star. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway also loaned Lee Enterprises $576 million, at 9 percent interest, to finance the deal and help alleviate Lee’s $400 million debt.
According to Alden’s SEC filing, the company “intends to engage in discussions with management and/or the Issuer’s Board of Directors about certain operational and strategic matters, including, but not limited to the recently announced acquisition of Berkshire Hathaway’s newspaper operations and matters pertaining to the Issuer’s 2020 Annual Meeting."
Alden has built a vulture capitalist reputation after acquiring and gutting media companies, like Digital First Media, and numerous other dailies and weeklies over the past decade. Alden unsuccessfully tried to acquire control of Gannett, Lee’s 50-50 partner in the Arizona Daily Star, by attempting to plant their members on the media company’s board in 2019. Gannett shareholders overwhelmingly rejected the hedge fund’s attempt last May.
Lee Enterprises has declined to comment on the potential acquisition at this time.
Tags: shares , Warren Buffet , BH Media Group , Arizona Daily Star , Lee Enterprises , Image
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Riley has served as a commander with OVPD since 2017, and has been employed with the department since 2004. Riley currently oversees field services for OVPD. Before becoming commander, Riley held roles such as patrol lieutenant and executive officer.
Town Council will vote on the appointment and an employment agreement for Riley at its scheduled meeting on Feb. 5. The meeting begins at 6 p.m. in Town Hall Council Chambers at 11000 N. La Cañada Drive.
Tags: Oro Valley , Oro Valley Police , police chief , Kara M. Riley , Chief Daniel Sharp , Image
Billionaire Warren Buffett is selling his 31-newspaper and digital media empire for a tidy sum of $140 million dollars to Lee Enterprises, the parent company of the Arizona Daily Star.
Lee Enterprises, the current manager of BH Media Group, was the only company considered due to handling the media group’s operations since 2018, according to Buffett in a statement.
“We believe that Lee is best positioned to manage through the industry’s challenges,” Buffett said in the statement.
Buffett, 89, previously described himself as a newspaper “addict” dedicated to purchasing more news outlets in a 2012 letter to BH Media Group’s publishers and editors. However, the billionaire seemingly soured on the profitability of the fourth estate, stating newspapers were “toast” in a 2019 Yahoo Finance interview. Buffett cites the decline in newspaper ad revenue for his lack of hope in the media industry during the same interview.
While Berkshire Hathaway will no longer be in the newspaper business, Buffett and co. will be lending Lee Enterprises $576 million at an annual interest rate of 9 percent to help finance the sell and consolidate their existing $400 million debt.
Once the deal finalizes, Berkshire Hathaway will be Lee Enterprises sole lender. Lee Enterprises will own 81 newspapers across the United States. The company currently owns 46 newspapers in 21 states.
Buffett acquired his first newspaper, Buffalo News, in 1977 and begin purchasing other news organizations as they became available, especially after the economic downturn of 2009.
Lee Enterprises is currently in a 50-50 partnership with media giant Gannett in the Arizona Daily Star. Gannett announced potential lay-offs and employee buyouts at the paper after merging with Gatehouse, another national media company, in 2019.
Tags: Buffet , newspapers , Arizona Daily Star , Lee Enterprises , Image
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
The latest group to come after Sen. Martha McSally? The Lincoln Project, a collection of onetime GOP strategists and advisors who have left the Republican Party in the wake of President Donald Trump's election—guys like Steve Schmidt and John Weaver (who both worked with the late John McCain) along with George Conway, the husband of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway and a frequent Trump critic.
The ad is downright brutal, pointing to McSally's tumbling approval rating and reminding viewers that she lost her 2018 Senate race. It closes by comparing McSally unfavorable to McCain and Barry Goldwater. "They stood for what was right, no matter the political risk. And they are remembered as American heroes," the narrator says. "And you, Martha? You'll be remembered as just another Trump hack—if you're remembered at all."
From the Lincoln Project release:
“Martha McSally is known for being a Trump hack,” said Jennifer Horn, spokesperson for The Lincoln Project. “But Arizona is known for strong, independent leadership from principled leaders like John McCain and Barry Goldwater. Arizonans clearly see who Martha McSally truly is—an unprincipled and unelected Trump hack.”
Sen. McSally is currently trying to hold onto her unelected Senate seat as Democrat Mark Kelly consistently polls above her. In 2018, she was appointed to serve in Sen. John McCain’s seat when interim Sen. Jon Kyl retired in 2019.
The Lincoln Project is working to defeat Donald Trump and those candidates who have abandoned their constitutional oaths, regardless of party.
Tags: Martha McSally , Lincoln Project , Trump hack , news , AZ elections 2020 , Image
U.S. Sen. Martha McSally decided she’d take to the pages of the Arizona Republic yesterday to explain why she called a CNN reporter a “liberal hack” instead of answering a basic question about whether she wanted to hear from witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
It was obviously a rehearsed line: McSally even had one of her staffers recording the incident so she could tweet it out and—by the end of the same day—start hawking T-shirts and raising campaign dollars off the exchange.
McSally’s opinion piece in the Republic spends a lot of time complaining that the liberal media is biased against her. And she boasts that she’s a real straight talker:
As a U.S. senator for Arizona, it is my responsibility to faithfully represent the people of Arizona and tell them the truth.Except McSally does play that game. She has dodged and weaved when it comes to basic questions about her positions since she first joined the campaign trail. In fact, you need look no further than the Arizona Republic on the same day her commentary was published.
The latter part of that duty is all too often lost in today’s political environment. Politicians often sugarcoat things, tell you what you want to hear and otherwise play games with language that obscures the truth in our politics. It’s a runaway train of people who never seem to say what they mean or what’s really going on.
And that’s when I get off the train.
I am not a career politician. I don’t play that game because it does a disservice to the people of Arizona.
Political reporter Yvonne Wingett Sanchez jumped right on the revelation that former National Security Advisor John Bolton reveals in his new book that Trump told him directly that he was holding up aid to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden. Sanchez, recognizing that Bolton was a big supporter of McSally and McSally was a big supporter of Bolton, thought it would be worthwhile to see if McSally would want to hear from Bolton directly on this matter, since it pretty much blows up Trump’s defense that holding up the aid had nothing to do with a Biden investigation.
Here’s what Sanchez wrote about her query to McSally: “Through a spokeswoman, McSally declined to say whether she wants to hear from Bolton.”
Such brave straight talk from Sen. McSally, who says her vow is “to tell you the truth. To explain my votes. And to call ’em like I see ’em.”
Except in this case. And this one. And this one. And this one…
Tags: Martha McSally , tough questions , journalists , Trump , impeachment , Image
Flood, 56, was arrested by police on Friday, April 5, 2019, after her twin autistic grandsons, aged 8, were found dead with “obvious signs of trauma” in their home. Flood, the twins’ guardian, told the police “she alone was responsible for her grandchildren’s deaths.”
According to Pima Superior Court documents, on Thursday, April 4, 2019, Flood shot the boys twice each, and then attempted to kill herself by taking an “unknown quantity of prescription medication.”
Northwest Fire District personnel responded to a medical call at their home on the 2400 block of West Kessler Place. Upon arrival, medical personnel found Flood unresponsive in the house. While providing medical care to her, they found the bodies of the boys with gunshot wounds to their heads and torsos.
The victims were identified as Jaden and Jordon Webb, who were nonverbal and severely autistic, according to court records. Flood became guardian of the boys in March 2017 after their mother, Kristen Webb, died in February 2017. The boys’ father is unknown. Flood had no previous criminal record in Pima County.
Tags: crime , sentencing , manslaughter , Dorothy Flood , news , Flowing Wells , Image
Friday, January 24, 2020
One local resident and two dogs are displaced after their home caught fire on Tucson’s Northwest side.
Northwest Fire District responded to a report of fire at the corner of Carapan Avenue and West Palm Vista Street at 1:05 p.m. on Friday, said Brian Keely, Public Information Officer at Northwest Fire District. Crews had the blaze under control by 1:25 p.m., according to Keely.
“We prevented (the fire) from spreading into any exposures on the other side,” Keely said. “It’s contained to just the one double-wide mobile home.”
Keely said it’s unknown at this time if anyone was home or if there were any injuries caused by the blaze at this time.
Northwest Fire District fire investigators are on the scene. The cause of the fire has not been determined at this time.
Tags: fires , breaking news , Northwest Fire , Northwest Tucson , Brian Keely , Image
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
According to Chadden Hunter, producer for the North America episode, the documentary crew filmed roadrunners in Saguaro National Park and on private ranch land around Tucson.
Also on the North America episode, camera crews achieved a first in their filming, using "low light technology and cable dollies with a motion control tracking time-lapse camera" to glide cameras through the forests of Mississippi and Ohio for slow-mo firefly shots.
Each episode of Seven Worlds, One Planet focuses on a different continent. The next airing episode is "North America" which premieres Saturday, Jan. 25 on BBC AMERICA, AMC, IFC and SundanceTV.
Watch the trailer here:
Tags: docs , Seven Worlds One Planet , trailer , BBC , roadrunners , Tucson , Image
Monday, January 20, 2020
"This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites. I call you my base." George W. BushBush made the comment at a high-rollers charity dinner where presidential candidates poke fun at themselves and their campaigns. Like any good self-deprecating joke, Bush's quip is on the money. In this case, literally on the money.
The HHM, the haves and have-mores. They're as much Doug Ducey's base as they were George Bush's. You see their fingerprints all over Ducey's education agenda. When he favors tax cuts over bringing schools back to their 2008 funding levels, that's all about the HHM. And he was thinking about their children when he created the results-based funding scheme. The way the funding is given out, the HHM's children are nearly certain to come out winners.
In my last post I compared how much results-based funding went to students in TUSD, Vail and the BASIS charter chain. Vail, it turns out, gets more than three times as much per student as TUSD. With one exception, every BASIS school is fully funded. That's because funding is based on the percentage of a school's students who pass the state's high stakes test, which is right in the wheelhouse of schools in high rent areas. For a district like TUSD which draws from many families living below the poverty level, passing the state test and qualifying for the funding is more hit-and-miss.
In a world where Ducey is governor and the legislature is majority Republican, the rich get richer, and their children get a richer education courtesy of results-based funding.
I decided to take a deeper dive into the data to see how the money is distributed to schools with children across the economic spectrum. I found funding inequities everywhere I looked.
Before I lay out the numbers, here are a few things I know for sure.
• A school doesn't deserve results-based funding just because it has no more than 10 percent of its students living below the poverty level.
• A school with 60 percent of its students below the poverty level is not 10 times more deserving of results-based funding than a school with 59 percent of its students below the poverty level.
• Any competent computer programmer could create a system for giving out the results-based funding in a more equitable way.
Tags: Results-based funding , Vail school district , TUSD , BASIS charter chain , Doug Ducey , Image
Friday, January 17, 2020
Sen. Martha McSally went viral yesterday when she responded to a reasonable question from CNN congressional reporter Manu Raju about whether she was willing to consider new evidence in President Donald Trump's impeachment trial. Instead, she said: "I’m not talking to you, You’re a liberal hack.”I'm a fighter pilot, I call it like it is and that's what I did today. pic.twitter.com/2PHc1fo2xo
— Martha McSally (@SenMcSallyAZ) January 17, 2020
McSally was clearly proud of the moment, tweeting out footage of her brushback and later going on Fox News Blonde Laura Ingraham’s show to dismiss the mainstream media altogether. “As you know, these CNN reporters , many of them around the Capitol, they are so biased. They are so in cahoots with the Democrats. They are so against the president. They run around trying to chase Republicans and asking trapping questions. I’m a fighter pilot. I call it like it is.”
Amusingly, the fighter pilot who calls it like it is then sidestepped the same question from Ingraham. ""I'm not going to tell everyone what my votes are going to be," she said in her usual evasive manner. (Remember this moment the next time one of McSally's allies says that her Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly, dodges tough questions.
McSally has sidestepped any and all questions about whether President Donald Trump’s shakedown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was appropriate. Instead, whenever she is asked about the trial, she flips the question and says Democrats are to blame for investigating the matter. And while she has given lip service to the notion that she’s going to be a fair juror who listens to all the evidence in the impeachment trial, there is zero chance that she would actually turn on Trump as that would be political suicide—and if there’s one thing McSally cares deeply about, it’s Martha McSally’s political ambitions.
It’s a standard feature of the 2018 Martha McSally model, which now comes loaded with extra Trumpiness. Unlike the earlier versions, which were critical of Trump and aimed to present the image of a reasonable moderate as she navigated the political currents of a competitive Southern Arizona congressional district, the 2018 McSally model has fully embraced Trump and his brash and insulting style. It likely cost her the 2018 election against Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, but she’s bought her ticket and she’s gonna ride.
It also helped McSally distract from more bad news. As The Skinny reported this week, multiple polls have shown McSally with lousy approval ratings. And yesterday, ahead of her attention-grabbing dismissal of CNN’s liberal hack, more bad news emerged: Her approval ratings continue to dive, according to Morning Consult’s quarterly tracking poll.
The Skinny mentioned this week that McSally has a “meh” rating in the ratings released in October, with 39 percent of surveyed voters approving of the job she’s doing and 37 percent disapproving, giving her a net plus-2-percent positive score . The latest numbers show that she has dropped 5 percentage points, to a negative-3-percent score. According to the survey, 37 percent of voters approved of the job she’s doing, while 40 percent disapproved. The survey showed that she suffered a huge 9-percentage-point drop among Republican voters as she dropped from 49 percent approval to 41 percent approval.
So McSally’s exchange with Raju served two purposes: It distracted from the news of her tumbling approval and it helped her with the GOP base that appears to be souring on her. We’ll find out in November whether it helps her with the independent and female voters who supported Sinema over her in 2018.
Tags: politics , McSally , Mark kelly , Manu Raju , news , GOP , Republicans , Martha McSally , Image
