Texas's record as death penalty capital: a help for Rick Perry? (The Christian Science Monitor)

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has presided over more executions than any governor in US history, at 235 ... and counting. With convicted murderer Duane Buck scheduled to die in Texas by lethal injection Thursday night, pending last-minute appeals to the governor and the US Supreme Court, a legitimate question is whether that record on capital punishment will help or hurt Mr. Perry in his quest for the GOP presidential nomination.

Among conservative Republicans, Perry's status as top executioner is something to be applauded. During Monday's GOP presidential debate, audience members cheered when Perry said he has "never struggled" with any of the executions he has presided over in his 11 years in office. "In the state of Texas," he said, "if you come into our state and you kill one of our children ... you will face the ultimate justice."

It's not the number of executions, per se, that is a potential liability for his candidacy, say some analysts, but rather whether Perry's faith in the state's justice system is justified. In the Buck case, for instance, the condemned man's lawyers say irregularities during sentencing, allegedly involving racially charged testimony, warrant a reconsideration of the death sentence.

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Perry "tends to emphasize the fact of conviction and present the other questions as technicalities,” says James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Such resolve plays well among Texans, who overwhelmingly support capital punishment. Moreover, voter concern about jobs and the economy vastly overshadows the matter of Perry’s death penalty record.

“There’s too much else going on right now,” Mr. Henson says. “In this environment, with the economy where it is, I’d be surprised if a lot of voters make a decision based on the death penalty.”

Capital punishment may matter more to moderate Republicans and independent voters in swing states. They may frame Perry’s record on executions as a character test, says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.

“Even people who favor capital punishment want to see each execution taken very seriously, and that includes libertarians who believe the ultimate violation of liberty is taking a life.… If someone is perceived as cavalier with human life, that will be a consideration,” says Mr. Sabato.

The Buck case is one of six that former Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, now a US senator, says need to be reopened because of racially charged statements made during sentencing hearings. Mr. Buck’s guilt is not in question – he was convicted in 1997 of killing two people – but his sentencing is under scrutiny because of a psychologist's testimony to jurors that black criminals are more likely to be repeatedly violent.

Bucka€?s attorneys are asking Perry to issue a 30-day reprieve so the matter can be further reviewed, and they are appealing to the US Supreme Court to intervene. At time of writing, neither the governora€?s office nor the high court had issued a response.

Because Perry is out of the state, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is set to preside over Buck's execution. Buck would be the second death-row inmate to die this week in Texas and the 11th this year.

Perrya€?s critics cite the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004 by lethal injection after being convicted of an arson that killed his three daughters. A leading fire scientist discounted the arson finding and suggested the fire could have been an accident, but Perry was not moved by his report to halt the execution. The case attracted national attention after a Chicago Tribune investigation highlighted a panel of experts who all agreed that the arson finding was wrongly applied.

What Perry has on his side is public opinion. Sixty-four percent of American adults favor the death penalty in cases of murder, compared with 29 percent who oppose it, according to a Gallup poll in October 2010, the last time the organization polled on the issue.

Perry is not likely to adjust his views on capital punishment, says Henson. “So far, it’s been more about modulation than moderation. I don’t think he’s moving to the center. Their strategy is, as much as possible, to run Perry as Perry,” he says.

If Perry were to win the GOP nomination, his hardliner approach on capital punishment is likely to join “a family of issues,” including creationism and global warming, that may “be lumped together as a combined source of vulnerability” for his campaign, says Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas, at Austin.

a€?The swagger is appealing for people on the Republican side, but off-putting for people in the middle,a€

Election 101: 11 questions about Rick Perry and his White House bid

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Pay TV industry loses record number of subscribers (AP)

NEW YORK – The weak economy is hitting Americans where they spend a lot of their free time: at the TV set.

They're canceling or forgoing cable and satellite TV subscriptions in record numbers, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of the companies' quarterly earnings reports.

The U.S. subscription-TV industry first showed a small net loss of subscribers a year ago. This year, that trickle has turned into a stream. The chief cause appears to be persistently high unemployment and a housing market that has many people living with their parents, reducing the need for a separate cable bill.

But it's also possible that people are canceling cable, or never signing up in the first place, because they're watching cheap Internet video. Such a threat has been hanging over the industry. If that's the case, viewers can expect more restrictions on online video, as TV companies and Hollywood studios try to make sure that they get paid for what they produce.

In a tally by the AP, eight of the nine largest subscription-TV providers in the U.S. lost 195,700 subscribers in the April-to-June quarter.

That's the first quarterly loss for the group, which serves about 70 percent of households. The loss amounts to 0.2 percent of their 83.2 million video subscribers.

The group includes four of the five biggest cable companies, which have been losing subscribers for years. It also includes phone companies Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. and satellite broadcasters DirecTV Group Inc. and Dish Network Corp. These four have been poaching customers from cable, making up for cable-company losses — until now.

The phone companies kept adding subscribers in the second quarter, but Dish lost 135,000. DirecTV gained a small number, so combined, the U.S. satellite broadcasters lost subscribers in the quarter — a first for the industry.

The AP's tally excludes Cox Communications, the third-largest cable company, and a bevy of smaller cable companies. Cox is privately held and does not disclose subscriber numbers.

Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett estimates that the subscription-TV industry, including the untallied cable companies, lost 380,000 subscribers in the quarter. That's about one out of every 300 U.S. households, and more than twice the losses in the second quarter of last year. Ian Olgeirson at SNL Kagan puts the number even higher, at 425,000 to 450,000 lost subscribers.

The second quarter is always the year's worst for cable and satellite companies, as students cancel service at the end of the spring semester. Last year, growth came back in the fourth quarter. But looking back over the past 12 months, the industry is still down, by Moffett's estimate. That's also a first.

The subscription-TV industry is no longer buoyed by its first flush of growth, so the people who cancel because they're unemployed are outweighing the very small number of newcomers who've never had cable or satellite before. Dish CEO Joe Clayton told analysts on a conference call Tuesday that the industry is "increasingly saturated."

But like other industry executives, Clayton sees renewed growth around the corner. Though his company saw the biggest increase in subscriber flight compared with a year ago, he blamed much of that on a strategic pullback in advertising, which will be reversed before the end of the year.

Other executives gave few indications that the industry has hit a wall. For most of the big companies, the slowdown is slight, hardly noticeable except when looking across all of them. Nor do they believe Internet video is what's causing people to leave.

Glenn Britt, the CEO of Time Warner Cable Inc. said the effect of Internet video on the number of cable subscribers is "very, very modest;" in fact, so small that it's hard to measure.

SNL Kagan's Olgeirson said the people canceling subscriptions behind, or never signing up, are an elusive group, difficult to count. Yet he believes the trend is real, and he calls it the "elephant in the room" for the industry.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that young, educated people who aren't interested in live programs such as sports are finding it easier to go without cable. Video-streaming sites like Netflix.com and Hulu.com are helping, as they run many popular TV shows for free, sometimes the day after they air on television.

In June, The Nielsen Co. said it found that Americans who watch the most video online tend to watch less TV. The ratings agency said it started noticing last fall that a segment of consumers were starting to make a trade-off between online video and regular TV. The activity was more pronounced among people ages 18-34.

Olgeirson expects programmers to keep tightening access to shows and movies online. A few years ago, Olgeirson said, "they threw open the doors," figuring they'd make money from ads accompanying online video besides traditional sources such as the fees they charge cable companies to carry their channels. But if it looks as if online video might endanger revenue from cable, which is still far larger, they'll pull back.

"Are they really going to jeopardize that? The answer is no," Olgeirson said.

Already, News Corp.'s Fox broadcasting company is delaying reruns on Hulu by a week unless the viewer pays a $8-a-month subscription for Hulu Plus or subscribes to Dish's satellite TV service. Other subscription-TV providers may join in the future. TV producers and distributors want to discourage people from dropping their subscriptions.

Moffett believes it's hard to separate the effect of the economy from that of Internet video. Subscription-TV providers keep raising rates because content providers such as Hollywood studios and sports leagues demand ever higher prices. That's causing a collision with the economic realities of American households.

"Rising prices for pay TV, coupled with growing availability of lower cost alternatives, add to a toxic mix at a time when disposable income isn't growing," Moffett said.

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Apple shares set record (Reuters)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc shares flirted with a record $400 on Wednesday, a day after the world's most valuable technology company posted blockbuster results and triggered a spate of brokerage upgrades.

The stock set a lifetime high as a new $999 MacBook Air and $599 "Mac mini" go on sale, the latter rivaling some of the cheaper offerings from Dell Inc or Hewlett-Packard Co.

Apple's stock climbed 3.3 percent to $389.18, bringing the makers of the iPhone and iPad within shouting distance of Exxon Mobil's market value of more than $400 billion despite the oil and gas producer raking in more than four times Apple's annual revenue.

In coming months, Apple is expected to roll out a new iPhone, which is likely to give the world's most valuable technology company another shot in the arm and offer a challenge to rivals such as Google Inc and Research in Motion.

The new phone could also propel Apple to leap past Exxon.

"We expect Apple will become the largest market cap company on the planet when the stock hits approximately $445 which is only about 13 percent away from aftermarket levels," said Gleacher & Co analyst Brian Marshall, adding that this is based on the assumption that Exxon shares remain flat.

Apple shares rose to a high of $405 in after-hours trading on Tuesday after iPhone sales and strong Asian business helped Apple's quarterly results beat Wall Street's expectations. Sales of its iconic products far outpaced forecasts, helping drive a near doubling of revenue in the fiscal third quarter.

"China is showing phenomenal strength for Apple and was up six-fold," Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard said. "This remains a huge opportunity for Apple and, in our view, is a major differentiator for the company. Apple has been able to successfully monetize China where competitors have been challenged."

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Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Wells Fargo raised their estimates on Apple's yearly earnings by 10 and 13 percent. Caris & Co raised their price target to $600 from $500, while Brigantine Advisors raised their target on the stock to $450 from $400.

"We find Apple's valuation compelling, particularly based on the upside potential from revenue and earnings growth in the Mac/PC and iPhone segments and from gross margins," Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a note to clients.

Apple moved 20.34 million iPhones during the quarter, which analysts say helped it vault past Nokia and Samsung Electronics to become the world's biggest smartphone maker.

While iPhones remain the flagship device, the company touted its new line of Intel-powered Macs on Wednesday and the latest version of its operating software, the multi-touch enabled Mac OS X Lion.

Mac shipments have helped Apple make the top-three among PC vendors in the United States, the first time it has done so in years, according to research firm Gartner.

Analysts worry that the success of the iPad will take away from not just Microsoft Windows PC sales, but also Apple's Mac business, something the company dismisses.

"It's taking away from the PC. When we surveyed people who buy iPads, more of them were choosing it instead of a computer," marketing chief Phil Schiller told Reuters.

"More are choosing it instead of a Windows computer than choosing it instead of a Mac."

(Additional reporting by Jennifer Saba in New York, writing by Edwin Chan)

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'Harry Potter' conjures first-day record of $92.1M (AP)

LOS ANGELES – Harry Potter has cast his biggest spell yet with a record-breaking first day at the box office for his final film.

Distributor Warner Bros. reports that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" summoned up $92.1 million domestically on opening day Friday.

That's nearly $20 million more than the previous record-holder, "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," which took in $72.7 million in its first day two years ago.

The film added $75 million in 57 overseas countries Friday, raising its international total to $157.5 million since it began rolling out Wednesday. That gives the film a worldwide total of about $250 million.

Among its first-day totals Friday was $14.8 million in Great Britain, which Warner Bros. reported was the biggest single day ever for a movie.

The first 3-D film in the series, "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" benefited from the higher price theaters charge for 3-D tickets, which cost a few dollars more than 2-D.

In a single day, "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" took in more money than four of the previous seven "Harry Potter" films did over their entire opening weekends.

The finale of the "Harry Potter" saga also set a record for midnight screenings with $43.5 million. That topped "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," which pulled in about $30 million in its first midnight shows last year.

Box-office tracker Hollywood.com projected Saturday that "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" also could break the opening-weekend record of $158.4 million domestically held by "The Dark Knight."

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