† The Summer Of Our Discontent: Last month U.S. employers hired the lowest number of workers since last September, with nonfarm payrolls rising only 18,000. The unemployment rate is now 9.2 percent, up from 9.1 percent in May. A year ago, Vice President Joseph Biden predicted the administration's $830 billion stimulus would usher in the "Recovery Summer." Since then, we’ve had the Faltering Fall, the Wobbly Winter, the Stumbling Spring and the Sputtering Summer. With persistent unemployment, consumers continue to hang tight to their wallets - which exacerbates the skittishness of employers, because “[c]onsumer spending is more than two-thirds of aggregate demand in the economy, The Washington Times explains:

Whatever recovery is under way must slow down when consumers are on the sidelines. That can be seen in the latest gross-domestic-product growth rate of 1.9 percent. A similarly disappointing number is expected in the second quarter.

The growth rate needs to be 3 percent simply to absorb new workers from population growth. A minimum of 5 percent growth would be necessary to bring the unemployment rate down …

Short-term fixes leave untouched the real problems: the growing fiscal deficit, the high government debt level, the increasing burden of government regulation - all of which crowd out private investment and limit job creation in the private sector. There will be no recovery summer unless the president and Congress get serious about addressing policy problems with solutions that promote consumer confidence and get the government out of the way of American enterprise.

† Restorative Capital Punishment: After the Supreme Court denied to stay the execution of Mexican national Humberto Leal Garcia, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) wasted no further time carrying out the justice meted out by a jury who convicted him of raping and murdering 16-year-old Adria Sauceda in 1994. “[Sauceda’s] brutalized nude body was found hours after he left a San Antonio street party with her. She was bludgeoned with a piece of 30- to 40-pound chunk of asphalt. … There was evidence Sauceda had been bitten [and] strangled,” The Washington Post reports:

Leal was just a toddler when he and his family moved to the U.S. from Monterrey, Mexico, but his citizenship became a key element of his attorneys’ efforts to win a stay. They said police never told him following his arrest that he could seek legal assistance from the Mexican government under an international treaty.

Mexico, the Obama administration and others had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay Leal’s execution so Congress could consider a law that would require court reviews in cases where condemned foreign nationals did not receive help from their consulates. They said the case could affect not only foreigners in the U.S. but Americans detained in other countries.

The court rejected the request 5-4. Its five more conservative justices doubted that executing Leal would cause grave international consequences, and doubted “that it is ever appropriate to stay a lower court judgment in light of unenacted legislation.”

“Our task is to rule on what the law is, not what it might eventually be,” the majority said. …

Leal’s argument that he should have received consular legal aid that could have helped his case was not new. Texas, the nation’s most active death penalty state, has executed other condemned foreign nationals who raised similar challenges, most recently in 2008.

Leal’s appeals, however, focused on legislation introduced last month in the U.S. Senate by Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. …

Measures similar to Leahy’s have failed at least twice in recent congressional sessions. The Texas Attorney General’s office, opposing the appeals, pointed to those failures in its Supreme Court arguments and said “legislative relief was not likely to be forthcoming.”

† Can We Be Adult About Stem Cell Research?: A 36-year-old Eritrean with a malignant tumor in his windpipe that did not respond to surgery or radiation and was impeding his ability to breathe was given a replacement that was engineered in a lab in a procedure being hailed as “a landmark achievement for regenerative medicine,” The Wall Street Journal reports:

"He was condemned to die," said Paolo Macchiarini, a professor of regenerative surgery who carried out the procedure at Sweden's Karolinska University Hospital. "We now plan to discharge him [Friday]." …

The windpipe is a hollow tube, about 4.5 inches long, leading to the lungs. A key part of it is a scaffold - which functions like a skeleton for the organ - consisting of tissues such as cartilage and muscle. As a first step, a team led by Alexander Seifalian of University College London used plastic materials and nanotechnology to make an artificial version of the scaffold in the lab. It was closely modeled on the shape and size of the Eritrean man's windpipe.

Meanwhile, researchers at Harvard Bioscience Inc. of Holliston, Mass., made a bioreactor, a shoe-box-size device similar to a spinning rotisserie machine. The artificial scaffold was placed on the bioreactor, and stem cells extracted from the patient's bone marrow were dripped onto the revolving scaffold for two days.

With the patient on the surgery table, Dr. Macchiarini and colleagues then added chemicals to the stem cells, persuading them to differentiate into tissue - such as bony cells - that make up the windpipe.

About 48 hours after the transplant, imaging and other studies showed appropriate cells in the process of populating the artificial windpipe, which had begun to function like a natural one. There was no rejection by the patient's immune system, because the cells used to seed the artificial windpipe came from the patient's own body.

The patient is cancer-free and expected to have a normal life expectancy.

† How To Tell When A “Hate Crime” Has Been Committed: Shaina Perry, a 22-year-old who was beaten at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend by a mob of black teenagers who took her backpack in which she had her asthma inhaler, debit card and cellphone, remembers her attackers jeering, “'Oh, white girl bleeds a lot." Other people who were also attacked in the park say police did not take their statements and brushed them off, the Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee) reports:

Emily Mowrer, 27, was not hurt but saw her friends beaten and punched and full beer bottles thrown at them. Her boyfriend was punched. She saw Perry lying with blood on her face, not moving. She called 911 on her cellphone.

"I saw some of my friends on the ground getting beat pretty severely. They got away with one of my friends' bikes. Some people had their wallets stolen," said Mowrer, who owns a house with her boyfriend in Riverwest. "It didn't seem like it was a mugging - it seemed like an attack. Like they weren't after anything - just violence." …

Perry needed three stitches to close a cut above her eye. She said she saw a friend getting kicked and when she walked up to ask what was happening, a man punched her in the face.

"I heard laughing as they were beating everybody up. They were eating chips like it was a picnic," said Perry, a restaurant cashier. "All I remember is seeing bright lights (after the punch), then my backpack was gone and blood was spurting out of my head." …

Most of the 11 people who told the Journal Sentinel they were attacked or witnessed the attacks on their friends said that police did not take their complaints seriously. They each said police responded to the scene quickly and tended to the injured, but officers did not take statements from them and told them to leave the area. …

[Riverwest resident Jessica Bublitz, 28] tried to tell an officer that her three-speed bicycle had been stolen and that one of her friends was hurt but said the officer told her he was looking for evidence.

"About 20 of us stayed to give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police wouldn't listen to us, they wouldn't take our names or statements. They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating," Bublitz said.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: TLC series “Extreme Couponing,” which debuted on April, has a cult following amongst women who want to save serious bucks, reports The Blaze:

[W]omen who carry pictures of their overflowing pantries on their cell phones; savvy shoppers who will spend hours flipping through newspaper and magazine advertisements in search of their bargains, and homemakers who have pinched pennies to put food on the table during the recession and need the extra help. …

Heather Border, a 36-year-old mother of four in rural Idaho, is a new to the extreme coupon phenomenon. But she was hooked a few weeks ago, after coupons and store deals brought her $180 grocery bill down to $40.

“I was feeling a little conspicuous because people were staring at me,” Border said. “Then, I felt a rush.”

She was among about 20 women who attended an extreme coupon class on a recent Saturday in Boise. The three-hour course was taught by [Monica] Knight and her business partner, Cathy Yoder. They own the extreme couponing blog, “Fabulessly Frugal.” …

Yoder started the blog about three years ago for family and friends. She knew Knight, who had also started to clip coupons, from her church and the two started blogging together in November 2008. A few months later, Yoder learned that she was pregnant with her seventh child, and then her husband lost his job.

Her family, however, had a reserve of food to fall back on thanks to coupons, Yoder said.

During her best shopping trip, she purchased 165 boxes of cereal for about $14.

It wasn’t long before Yoder and Knight realized their extreme coupon website could make money. The site features advertisements and they get paid per click on about 75 percent of the coupons found on the website, Yoder said. They made $35 the first month it featured the coupons, she said.

“We make that in an hour now,” said Yoder, who now supports her family with the website, which gets about 30,000 hits per day.

† Obama Is Just About Every U.S. President All Rolled Into One!: Except for the Gipper. Board-certified diagnostic radiologist Milton R. Wolf, MD, argues that his cousin, President Barack Hussein Obama, “is no Ronald Reagan,” in this Washington Times op-ed:

When President Reagan entered office, America faced a deep recession with double-digit unemployment and inflation, plus dishearteningly long gas lines. Rather than wasting time blaming his predecessor, the Gipper went right to work unveiling Reaganomics - an embrace of the free market - which included four simple principles: (1) lower tax burden, (2) lower government spending, (3) lower regulatory burden, and (4) a strong dollar monetary policy. …

Some 20 million jobs were created. Unemployment dropped to 5.3 percent. The gross domestic product growth rate hit a high of 6.8 percent, and the total economy grew by nearly a third. Inflation dropped to 3.2 percent. Even the oil shortage was solved almost overnight. …

Obamanomics favors top-down compulsory cooperation over voluntary. It is the anti-Reaganomics. Mr. Obama has done the following: (1) raised taxes, (2) unleashed a wild orgy of spending, including his disastrous so-called "stimulus," (3) dramatically increased regulations and even nationalized industries and businesses, and (4) printed money out of "quantitative easing" thin air.

The results were predictable. Since the Obama stimulus - a collection of "shovel-ready" projects promised to save the economy - was signed into law, America has lost 1.9 million jobs and unemployment has surpassed 9 percent. GDP growth remains anemic. Consumer confidence has tumbled. Gas prices were at $1.81 per gallon before Mr. Obama put his "boot on the neck" of suppliers, and now it's more than doubled, to $3.81. We burn our food supply in our gas tanks, and grocery prices have skyrocketed - some staples by as much as 40 percent. Since the president signed his mortgage rescue plan, Americans have seen 3.82 million foreclosures. Most disturbingly, the majority of Americans are receiving some type of welfare.

Wolf has a message for his cuz: “It's time to put Obamanomics where it belongs: on the trash heap of history. Got a shovel?”

† We Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Over Here?: Part XV: Homegrown terrorists James Cromitie, David Williams and Onta Williams who were found guilty of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and other charges stemming from a plot to blow up a Bronx synagogue were sentenced to 25 years in prison. The sentencing of Laguerre Payen, who was also convicted in the case is pending the results of a psychiatric evaluation.

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: On a recent appearance on The Daily Show, comedian Louis CK, star of FX Network show Louie, deconstructed fart jokes to explain why they are funny to Jon Stewart (warning: NSFW):  

[Hat Tip: Mediaite]

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, You Can’t Hide Your Prying Eyes): UCLA Health System agreed to pay an $865,000 settlement stemming from an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that found hospital employees repeatedly accessed electronic health records of celebrity patients between 2005 and 2008, The Associated Press reports:

The settlement that UCLA reached with federal regulators Wednesday did not name the stars involved and did not require the hospital system to admit liability.

The hospitals have agreed to report to a federal monitor on the implementation of its corrective plan over the next three years.

In a statement Thursday, UCLA said it has taken steps over the past three years to retrain staff and strengthen its computer systems. …

Former administrative specialist Lawanda Jackson, 50, pleaded guilty to selling information to the National Enquirer from the files of Britney Spears, Farrah Fawcett and other high-profile celebrities. She died from complications of breast cancer before she could be sentenced.

Former medical school researcher Huping Zhou was sentenced to four months in federal prison and fined $2,000 for reading the confidential medical files of co-workers and celebrities such as Drew Barrymore, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Hanks.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Is Hasan A Crazy Terrorist, Or A Terrorist Crazy?): Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder in the November 2009 shooting rampage at spree at Fort Hood, will be tried in a military court and face the death penalty, The Associated Press reports:

It was not immediately clear when Hasan will be arraigned in a Fort Hood courtroom. He must plead not guilty based on the nature of the case, according to military law.

Hasan's lead attorney, John Galligan, had urged the commanding general not to seek the death penalty, saying such cases were more costly, time-consuming and restrictive. In cases where death is not a punishment option for military jurors, soldiers convicted of capital murder are automatically sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. …

Galligan has declined to say whether he is considering an insanity defense for his client. He has refused to disclose results of a military mental health panel's evaluation of Hasan but said it would not prevent the military from pursuing a court-martial.