By THOMAS KOROSEC
Houston Chronicle

CRAWFORD - From a wooden bench in front of a shop selling mementos of “The Western White House,” tourist Chuck Yorde wondered aloud why he seemed to be the only visitor in town.

“If his poll numbers were up there above 50-60 percent, this place would probably be a little more jumping,” said Yorde, surveying the empty parking spots up and down Lone Star Parkway.

The Youngstown, Ohio, resident was almost apologetic about his own presence in the town that hosts President George W. Bush’s 1,600-acre ranch. He said he was visiting his sister in nearby Gatesville who’s “a big Bush fan. … She dragged me over here.”

Shuttered storefronts and eroding retail sales figures show tourism and the Bush memorabilia business are slumping in this once’sleepy farm-and-ranch town of 732 residents.

A for’sale sign is the only thing in the smudged window of the turn-of-the-century, two’story brick building that once housed the Crawford Country Style store. “The numbers just weren’t working,” said Norma Nelson Crow, who closed the shop at the beginning of the year.

Traffic and sales of shirts, caps, refrigerator magnets and other presidential curios began slowing in 2005, she said. By the summer of 2006, Crow said, her hopes for a turnaround in the business faded. “It was my baby and I loved that little store, but I had to face the facts,” she said.

Retail sales figures kept by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts document the slide. In 2004, gross retail sales in Crawford totaled $2.6 million. They fell to $2 million in 2006, down by more than 20 percent.

Nobody is saying things have improved at all this year. “It’s pretty slow, slower than last summer,” Jamie Burgess, manager of the Red Bull gift shop, said last week.

Only a handful of customers came in during the day to browse her collection of Bush curios and homespun decorative items sold on consignment.

Katrina vanden Heuvel
from “The Nation”

Back in the days when Governor George Bush was only able to screw-up Texas instead of an entire nation, 57 lawyers representing men - and a woman - on death row requested commutations so that their clients might receive life instead of death.

When approached by lawyers representing mentally retarded inmates, Bush refused.

When approached by lawyers representing inmates whose court-appointed lawyers had slept during their trials, Bush refused.

When approached by lawyers representing men who had committed the crime in question as juveniles, Bush refused.

In each case, then-Governor Bush felt that the defendants had had full and equal access to the law.

But now along comes Scooter. President Bush deemed his 30-month sentence “excessive” and - just like that - commuted his sentence prior to any judicial review. Libby had the finest legal representation. He never expressed any remorse for lying to a grand jury or for his role in the administration’s snow job on the American people that led our nation into a war. Yet Scooter is the lucky soul granted clemency by Bush.

In an article for the once-hyped but now defunct magazine, Talk, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson interviewed then-Gov. Bush about Karla Faye Tucker, a woman who had recently been executed after he denied her clemency. Bush’s response struck Carlson as “odd and cruel” and he described this exchange:

“I watched [Larry King's] interview with [Karla Faye Tucker]…,” Bush said. “He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’ ‘What was her answer?’ I wonder.

‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’

Odd and cruel, indeed. Carlson provoked a bit of a media storm for revealing Bush’s callousness at a time when - unlike now - he was still viewed as Mr. Compassionate Conservative. (The Bush presidential campaign tried to deny that Bush had made this statement but to no avail.) Bush seemed all the more cruel given that appeals for clemency had been made by figures from around the world, including Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, the Huntsville prison warden and correction officers who testified that Tucker was a model prisoner and reformed, a prosecutor of her accomplice, the brother of one of her murder victims, Pope John Paul II and the European Parliament.

read more at THE NATION

WASHINGTON, July 11 (UPI) — Finding majority support for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq remains a daunting challenge in the Senate, said the U.S. Senate Democratic whip.

“Obviously there are folks who want the war to end today and all the troops to be home tomorrow. And even though I think that is a worthy goal, it is not a realistic goal,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in a Washington Post report Wednesday.

Despite growing discontent with the war, convincing GOP members to support withdrawal legislation with specific troop numbers and target dates is a daunting challenge, Durbin said.

Durbin conceded to the Post that Democrats, with a slim majority in the Senate, won’t be able to placate calls from liberal Democrats who want a specific end date to the war and a funding cut off.

Major troop withdrawal must be done gradually, Durbin said.

“We also understand that just leaving cold turkey, with everything gone, could have the whole region descend into chaos,” Durbin told the Post.

By Michael Holden
from YAHOO! NEWS

LONDON (Reuters) - Four men were jailed for 40 years each on Wednesday for attempting to carry out suicide bombings on London’s transport system, a plot said to be part of an al Qaeda planned series of attacks on the British capital.

Judge Adrian Fulford told the four he had no doubt their botched attempt to bomb three underground trains and a bus on July 21, 2005, two weeks after 52 people were killed in similar attacks, had been directed by Osama bin Laden’s group.

The second wave of attacks only failed because, although the detonators fired, the bombs did not explode.

“This was a viable, indeed a very nearly successful, attempt at mass murder,” Fulford told the court. “These were not truly isolated events but … coordinated and connected in that I have no doubt they were part of an al Qaeda inspired and controlled sequence of attacks.”

The men, Muktah Said Ibrahim, Yassin Hassan Omar, Ramzi Mohammed and Hussein Osman, all Muslims of African origin, were found guilty on Monday of conspiracy to murder.

Sentencing them, Fulford ruled they should stay in jail for a minimum of 40 years, the maximum sentence he said he could impose in light of other terrorism cases.

The men looked impassive as the sentences were handed down. As they left the courtroom, Osman clutched a Koran to his chest.

Earlier, two other suspects on whom the jury failed to reach verdicts, were told they would face a retrial.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

By LAURIE KELLMAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - President Bush’s former political director says she intends to follow his directive and not answer questions about her role in the administration’s firing of federal prosecutors - unless a court directs her to defy her former boss.

“While I may be unable to answer certain questions today, I will answer those questions if the courts rule that this committee’s need for the information outweighs the president’s assertion of executive privilege,” Sara M. Taylor, who left her White House job two months ago, said in remarks prepared for presentation to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

“Thank you for your understanding,” she added in the statement, made available in advance of the midmorning hearing.

Democrats insist that there are plenty about the firings that Taylor can discuss - and is compelled to reveal under a subpoena - that are not covered by Bush’s executive privilege claim.

Her lawyer was expected to advise her as the hearing progressed on which questions she could or could not answer under the president’s directive.

The same goes for a second former Bush aide, one-time White House counsel Harriet Miers, Democrats say. Miers, subpoenaed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, said through her lawyer this week that she “cannot provide the documents and testimony that the committee seeks.”

“Ms. Miers is thus subject to conflicting commands, with Congress demanding the production of information that the counsel to the president has informed her she is prohibited from disclosing,” Miers’ lawyer, George Manning, wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan and ranking Republican Lamar Smith of Texas.

The two former aides are now private citizens, and some congressional officials have argued that it is not clear Bush’s executive privilege claim covers them even though White House Counsel Fred Fielding told lawyers for Miers and Taylor that the president was directing them not to answer questions or provide any information about the firings.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer

Bradford Plumer, a reporter and researcher at The New Republic, is interested in studies showing that scientists think lead abatement in the 1980s might have been a major driver in the great crime decline of the 1990s. “On this theory,” writes Plumer on his personal blog, “children who are exposed to lead paint or gasoline fumes are more likely to become violent teenagers. Rick Nevin, an economist, argues that the reduction in lead pollution in the 1970s and 1980s can account for most of the decline in New York City’s crime rate over the past decade.”

Plumer feels there’s a problem, however:

“The Bush administration loves lead. Loves it. They want it everywhere. Okay, that’s only a slight exaggeration: Back in 2002, the White House tried to stack an advisory committee on lead regulations with industry types. Last December, the administration announced that it would consider doing away with the standards that cut lead from gasoline, at the behest of battery makers and lead smelters. And its EPA has weakened a rule on removing lead paint from older residences.”

Data May Undermine Giuliani’s Claims

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001.

“I began with the city that was the crime capital of America,” Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox’s Chris Wallace. “When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent.”

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani’s tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the “New York miracle” was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children’s exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin’s work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

“It is stunning how strong the association is,” Nevin said in an interview. “Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead.”

Through much of the 20th century, lead in U.S. paint and gasoline fumes poisoned toddlers as they put contaminated hands in their mouths. The consequences on crime, Nevin found, occurred when poisoning victims became adolescents. Nevin does not say that lead is the only factor behind crime, but he says it is the biggest factor.

Giuliani’s presidential campaign declined to address Nevin’s contention that the mayor merely was at the right place at the right time. But William Bratton, who served as Giuliani’s police commissioner and who initiated many of the policing techniques credited with reducing the crime rate, dismissed Nevin’s theory as absurd. Bratton and Giuliani instituted harsh measures against quality-of-life offenses, based on the “broken windows” theory of addressing minor offenses to head off more serious crimes.

read more at The Washington Post

By CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN
The New York Times
h/t to Virginia

The young woman in the American Cancer Society advertisement holds up a photograph of a smiling blonde. “My sister accidentally killed herself. She died of skin cancer,” reads the headline.

The public service announcement, financed by the sunscreen maker Neutrogena, is running in 15 women’s magazines this summer. It warns readers that “left unchecked, skin cancer can be fatal,” and urges them to “use sunscreen, cover up and watch for skin changes.”

The woman in the picture is a model, not a skin cancer victim. And the advertisement’s implicit message - that those who die of skin cancer have themselves to blame - has provoked a sharp response from some public-health doctors, who say the evidence simply does not support it.

As the advertisement says, skin cancer is the most common form of cancer. But most skin cancer is not life-threatening: it represents less than 2 percent of all cancer deaths, an estimated 10,850 people this year. Almost all of those deaths are from melanoma, which makes up only 6 percent of all skin-cancer cases.

And the link between melanoma and sun exposure is not straightforward. Dr. Marianne Berwick, an epidemiologist at the University of New Mexico who studies skin cancer, led a study published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 2005 finding that people who had a lot of sun exposure up to the time they got a diagnosis of melanoma actually had better survival rates than those who had little sun exposure. The researchers are conducting a large’scale follow-up aimed at clarifying the relationship between sun exposure and melanoma.

Until that is made clear, many doctors say, it is premature to suggest that people are endangering their lives by failing to use sunscreen.

“It’s just not that simple,” said Dr. Barry Kramer, associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health.

“We do have some pretty good evidence that sunscreen will reduce your risk of the less lethal forms of skin cancer,” Dr. Kramer added. “There’s very little evidence that sunscreens protect you against melanoma, yet you often hear that as the dominant message.”

Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, acknowledges that the advertisement is aggressive. “We have taken some license in taking that message and using it the way we-ve used it,” he said, “because that’s the way to get the message to our target audience.”

Dr. Lichtenfeld said the advertisements were aimed at women ages 20 to 48 because sun exposure in childhood and young adulthood can influence skin cancer risk later in life, and it is mothers who largely control children’s time in the sun.

He added that the advertisement’s creators settled on the approach with the help of focus groups, who told them, “To get the message through to me, you have to shock me and get my attention.”

“Our focus groups showed us that these young women as a group were oblivious to the risk and felt that skin cancer isn-t a serious problem,” Dr. Lichtenfeld said, adding, “The issue isn-t A-How can you tell whether it was caused by sun exposure?- The issue is to try and prevent that sun exposure earlier in life so we reduce the risk for people later in life.”

In an effort to spread awareness about sun safety, the cancer society has joined with Neutrogena, a division of Johnson & Johnson whose sunscreens carry the society’s logo.

As part of the agreement, Neutrogena is paying for the public’service campaign, though its name is not mentioned in the advertisement.

Iris Grossman, director of communications for Johnson & Johnson, said the partnership benefited both parties. “We have the common goal of raising awareness of the importance of sun protection,” she said.

But this financial relationship raises red flags for some experts. “When people see an American Cancer Society public service announcement,” said Dr. Lisa Schwartz, co-director of the Outcomes Group at the Veterans Affairs hospital in White River Junction, Vt., “they expect it to reflect the best evidence. We don-t want people who have a financial interest to be telling you the benefit of doing something.” Dr. Lichtenfeld replied that Neutrogena did not influence the cancer society’s message on skin cancer.

The subject “has been important to our organization for some time,” he said, adding that the announcements “don-t promote something with a Neutrogena message on it - it’s our message.”

Howard L. Kaufman, co-director of the Melanoma Center at Columbia University and author of “The Melanoma Book” (Gotham, 2005), estimates that only 20 percent of melanomas are related to sun exposure, but says, “It’s the one risk factor that we can control.” While he calls the advertisements “a little bit alarmist” he says they are meant to raise awareness and they achieve that goal.

But Dr. Kramer, of the National Institutes of Health, disputes the advertisement’s assertion that skin cancer is “almost always curable if you catch it early.”

“There’s no high-quality evidence,” he said, “that shows that skin cancer screening prevents deaths.”

While the notion that detecting and treating early’stage cancers can prevent deaths might seem logical, the idea represents a gross oversimplification of how cancer works, Dr. Kramer said.

George W. Reilly
Providence Journal
from Military.com
h/t to Glenn

Moves in Congress to give the Department of Veterans Affairs as much as $3.8 billion more than the Bush administration proposed has drawn an indirect veto threat from the White House.

“If Congress increases VA funding above the president’s request and does not offset this increase with spending reductions in other bills, the president will veto any of the other bills that exceed his request until Congress demonstrates a path to reach the president’s top line of $933 billion,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.
The Veterans Affairs budget currently stands at $36.5 billion, and the administration has proposed raising it to $40.1 billion. In Congress, a conference committee is attempting to reconcile a House bill providing $3.8-billion beyond that with a Senate measure that would increase the administration’s proposal by $3.6 billion.

Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Texas, chairman of the House veterans affairs appropriations subcommittee, said, “This bill is about respect, and honors the promises made to our veterans with historic increases in funding to provide them the health care and benefits they earned when they put on our nation’s uniform.”

Bill to Improve Care

Responding to shabby outpatient treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., a group of U.S. senators moved June 13 to boost disability pay to those hurt in combat and improve care for brain injury. The measure would also expand medical care and counseling to family members and require better cooperation to end red tape for disabled service members moving from Pentagon care to that provided by the VA.

The measure would boost military severance pay for those rated with less than 30 percent disability and eliminate the current requirement that severance pay be deducted from disability pay. It would also set up Pentagon pilot programs that would give the VA a greater role in the evaluation system, a major shift in how benefits are administered.

read more at MILITARY.COM

Michael Moore defends his numbers and figures in “Sicko” against Dr. Kupta on Larry King Live. Funny, why doesn’t CNN focus on the issue of failed healthcare in America rather than slamming Moore.

I wonder how many of these 1,000 actually called “hundreds” of times within a month. What…..1? And if they were calling, obviously whatever problem they had was NOT solved.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sprint Nextel Corp, which recently launched an advertising campaign to attract new customers, is disconnecting more than 1,000 subscribers for calling its customer service lines too often and making what the company called unreasonable requests.

The No. 3 U.S. wireless provider with 53 million customers said on Monday it started sending service termination letters on June 25. Sprint said the cancellations involved 1,000 to 1,200 customers who had called the company about 40,000 times a month in total.

“These customers were calling to a degree that we felt was excessive,” said Sprint spokeswoman Roni Singleton, adding the company needed to cull its customer base to improve services.

“In some cases they were calling customer care hundreds of times a month for a period of six to 12 months on the same issues even after we felt those issues had been resolved,” she said.

Singleton, noting that mass cancellation letters were not routine, said this call volume was 40 to 50 times more than average customer monthly calls. She would not say how often customers can call before being deemed too demanding.

More at Reuters

By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The dollar hit a record low against the euro and 26-year troughs against sterling on Tuesday, as investors fretted about a possible fallout from weakness in the U.S. subprime mortgage market.

The dollar also slumped nearly 1 percent against the yen, as risk-averse investors cut back on “carry trade” transactions funded by borrowing in the Japanese currency.

In carry trades, investors borrow in a low-yielding currency such as the yen to buy higher-yielding units such as the dollar.

“This is a combination of unwinding of carry trades and broad dollar weakness, mainly because of what S&P did,” said Ashraf Laidi, chief currency analyst, at CMC Markets in New York.

On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s said it may cut 612 residential mortgage-backed securities backed by U.S. subprime loans, affecting $12 billion in debt. Subprime loans are extended to borrowers with poor credit.

The subprime news pushed down U.S. stocks, bond yields and the dollar across the board.

More at Reuters

This is very bad. And it’s going to get worse. These companies are resellers. They don’t manufacture anything. So if their sales decline, then the companies they purchase goods from will have their sales fall. More people out of work. Bur$atil is so spot on. Our economy is going to hell in a handbasket. Poverty is on the rise. Hunger is on the rise. Crime is on the rise. And it’s only going to get worse.

NEW YORK — Sears Holdings Corp., the biggest US department store company, and Home Depot Inc. said profit will fall as the decline in housing prices hurts demand for goods to build and furnish homes.

“We’re seeing the effects of the housing market ripple through the consumer segment,” said Jim Dorment, who helps manage $265 billion, including Sears and Home Depot shares, at U.S. Trust Corp. in New York.

The biggest US housing slump in 16 years has reduced spending on big-ticket items, causing appliance sales to decline.

Home Depot also said profit and revenue may drop after the planned sale of its contractor supplies unit.

Sears said yesterday that second-quarter net income will be $160 million to $200 million, down as much as 46 percent from $294 million a year earlier.

Home Depot, the world’s largest home improvement retailer, said earnings per share may drop as much as 18 percent in the year through Feb. 3. Sales may decline for the first time ever, the Atlanta company said.

Shares of Sears, based in Hoffman Estates, Ill., plunged the most in more than four years, falling $17.20, or 10 percent, to $154.21. Home Depot shares rose 2 cents to $40.25, the only stock that gained among 29 members of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Retailing index.

More at Boston.com