Rough roads and bridges keep rural businesses from moving forward in Minnesota, study says

The collapse of a major bridge in Minneapolis last August brought attention to the need for improved transportation infrastructure in Minnesota and throughout the country. Aging roads and bridges remain major concern for rural Minnesotans, especially when it comes to business, write Conrad deFiebre and Matt Entenza of The Bemidji Pioneer. The Pioneer is a 9,500-circulation daily in northern Minnesota.

"Rural Minnesotans are paying a high price for the state’s underinvestment; nearly $400 each because of excess wear and tear on cars and higher local property taxes to make up road funding shortfalls," they write in a commentary. "Poor roads and bridges are bad for rural Minnesota’s business climate. Weight restrictions and more frequent repairs make it harder to bring goods to market."

They point to "Moving Forward," a report from nonpartisan think tank Minnesota 2020, which said the state could expect an 8-to-1 return on transportation investments. To pay for such investments, the deFiebre and Entenza call for the passage of a comprehensive transportation finance bill and the raising of vehicle user fees. (Read more)

Rural restaurants anchor communities' social scene

Local cafes and diners still thrive in many small towns, and their success is based on far more than the burgers or coffee they serve. These rural eateries offer social gathering places that can unite communities, writes Sarah Moore of the The Beaumont (Tex.) Enterprise.

Her look at three country restaurants, which also ran in The Houston Chronicle, highlights the social venue they provide in the rural parts of Jefferson County, Texas. At Fannett Country Cafe, Callie Bain (above, in an Enterprise photo by Dave Ryan) serves many of the same folks every day, so that when a regular doesn't show, someone usually goes looking to find out why. "It's the place to find out who's sick, who's well, who's building a house and who's getting a divorce," Moore writes. "The plus is, everyone knows your name. The downside? They know everything else about you — and they'll never let you forget it."

Her feature is worth reading, but it could give you a serious craving for some classic comfort food. (Read more)

Biofuels boom could send price of beer rising

The ethanol boom has had many consequences for food and fuel markets around the world, and now beer drinkers may start feeling the effects. As a result of more farmers changing crops to cash in on the ethanol boom, the price of beer could be going up in the next few months, reports Teresa Garcia of ABC-7 in San Francisco.

That's because the price of two major beer ingredients — malted barley and hops — has risen due to shortages worldwide. The price of a pound of hops has gone from $5 to $20 in recent years due to poor harvests in 2006 and 2007. On top of that, fewer farmers are growing the crops in hopes of making more from biofuel crops.

"You have this huge crunch for ethanol production, so fields that were doing barley in the mid-west are now switching over to corn. It's subsidized, plus you know there's a huge demand for it," said Dan Gordon, owner of Gordon Biersch Bewing Co. Gordon said the shortages could mean the price of a six-pack of "craft beers" — those made by smaller brewers — could go up 50 cents by February or March. (Read more)

Rural results in New Hampshire's primary were the reverse of statewide: Obama edged out Clinton

Barack Obama lost New Hampshire's presidential primary, but he ran better in its rural areas than he did in Iowa's, where he won last week's caucuses. The Illinois senator carried the nine rural counties in the Granite State, but narrowly lost the state to New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, who ran more strongly in the two urban counties -- and generally in the state's cities and suburbs, according to news reports.

Analysis of the county-by-county results as published in the New Hampshire Union Leader shows that Obama won 38.2 percent of the vote in the more rural counties, those north and west of Hillsborough and Rockingham counties, where the urban centers of Manchester, Nashua and Portsmouth are located. Statewide, Obama got 36.4 percent of the vote to Clinton's 39 percent. Clinton won 36.3 percent of the rural counties' vote, while former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina won 17.3 percent, 0.4 points more than his statewide share. (Strafford County, along the Maine border north of Portsmouth, is in the Boston metropolitan area, but we count it as rural on the advice of our New Hampshire correspondents. It produced 9.4 percent of the vote and gave Clinton a 6-point margin.)

Put another way, Obama got 52.3 percent of his vote from the rural counties, which produced 50.2 percent of the total vote. Edwards' vote was 51 percent rural and Clinton's was 46.3 percent rural. A more detailed analysis, by town rather than county, might well produce somewhat different results, but this is all we can do at this juncture. We welcome calculations by those who know which towns are rural and which are not. (All New Hampshire residents live in a town, the basic unit of government in New England.)

Pre-election polls showed no statistical difference among the Democrats in rural and urban vote, but dis show that Arizona Sen. John McCain was leading in rural areas, and that proved true yesterday. As calculated by the Daily Yonder (which did not count Strafford County as rural), McCain got 40 percent of the rural vote, and 37 percent statewide.

The Yonder story by Bill Bishop notes, "Most of rural New Hampshire votes more Democratic than the urban counties along the southern border of the state. Only two rural New Hampshire counties — Belknap and Carroll — voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 election." For the Yonder's detailed story, click here.

UPDATE, Jan. 10: Karl Rove says in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that Clinton carried "less-affluent rural areas," and Pew pollster Andrew Kohut notes in a New York Times op-ed that Clinton beat Obama by 12 percentage points in households earning less than $50,000. One lesson here may be that rural New Hampshire is more affluent than rural America.

Study shows switchgrass highly efficient for ethanol

When it comes to producing ethanol efficiently, switchgrass stands out. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that the prairie grass (at left in a U.S. Department of Agriculture photo) delivers 540 percent more renewable energy than the energy consumed in growing it, including fertilizer and its production, a point on which it has a clear advantage over corn. In addition, the use of switchgrass as biomass has environmental benefits such as reduced greenhouse gas emissions and increased soil conservation.

The study b the University of Nebraska "clearly demonstrates that managed switchgrass production systems have the potential to produce significantly more energy than is used in production and conversion," its authors write. Switchgrass has additional appeal since it does not require great farmland to grow. "Switchgrass is a good crop for marginal crop lands," Ken Vogel, a co-author of the study, told Timothy Gardner of Reuters. "Corn is still going to be grown to make ethanol; whether it ever takes a chunk of crop land away from corn is all going to come down to economics." Cellulosic ethanol now costs about twice as much as that produced from corn, but advances in the breakdown of cellulose could bring costs down, Gardner reports. (Read more)

At Iowa State University, John Verkade and his colleagues are trying to turn a 40-year-old discovery into a breakthrough for cellulosic ethanol production. For the past 40 years, Verkade has told a funny story about one of his Iowa State University students who thought a classmate might be swiping his lab materials. Today, that story could be the key to breaking down switchgrass and other plant material cheaply, ISU's Mike Krapfl writes.

On that day in the 1960s, Verkade's student, David Hendricker, discovered that his missing wooden applicators actually were being broken down by the chemical compound he was studying. Verdaker and Hendricker sought a patent, but it got lost in the shuffle until recently when another university professor, George Kraus, thought the compound could have a role in ethanol production. Verkade has since followed up with a proposal for U.S. Department of Energy funding. Verkade (on the left in photo by Bob Elbert) won a two-year, $125,000 grant and enlisted the research help of Reed Oshel (on the right in the same photo), an Iowa State graduate student. So far, they have had success using the compound to break down cellulose. Verkade says more research needs to be done, specifically to see how the compound might fit into the fermentation process. (Read more)

Study finds rural patients are less likely to receive organ transplants, and are net organ donors

Rural patients are less likely to be placed on waiting lists for organ transplants and less likely to receive transplants than urban patients, according to a study published in this week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. David A. Axelrod and his colleagues at Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, N.H., investigated the influence of rural residence on heart, kidney and lung transplant waiting lists and transplantation rates. The authors analyzed data from 174,630 patients who were wait-listed and who underwent heart, liver, or kidney transplantation between 1999 and 2004.

"This study demonstrates that patients living in small towns and isolated rural regions were eight percent to 15 percent less likely to be wait-listed and ten percent to 20 percent less likely to undergo heart, liver, and kidney transplantation than patients in urban environments," the authors write.

The rate of survival following a transplant was similar for rural and urban patients. The authors conclude that certain "barriers" block access for rural patients. Chief among those is the fact that most transplant services are located in urban centers, which means rural patients often must to long distances for care. To watch video report on the JAMA study, go here.

ATV enthusiasts want Appalachian regional system

Building trails for all-terrain vehicles in national forests and other public areas would attract adventure tourism and reduce ATV-caused erosion and other damage to natural areas, like that shown in the photo by Richard Jessee of The Coalfield Progress of Norton, Va., according to advocates of a trail system in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia.

Jack McClanahan of Big Stone Gap, Va., told Wise County supervisors last week that "plans are in motion for Southwest Virginia legislators to introduce General Assembly legislation that would create an authority to oversee a proposed system of trails tailor-made for each recreational use," reports Jodi Deal in the Progress. “If ATV trails are established, it would take a lot of pressure off of nature trails,” McClanahan told the supervisors. “We can’t just turn our back on ATVs and hope they go away. We can regulate them.”

"According to McClanahan, a similar project in West Virginia, the Hatfield and McCoy Regional Recreation Authority, has drawn plenty of people and money into the counties it covers. . . . Those with specialized hobbies will pay top dollar for a good trail experience, McClanahan added, noting that a friend who rents horses and mountain bikes to trail enthusiasts estimates that mountain bikers spend about $300 per day when visiting a destination.

In Harlan County, Kentucky, where ATV tourism is popular and a regional trail system is also planned, "an enthusiast was recently asked to guide a group of 14 tourists from Vermont around his hometown hills," Deal reports, citing McClanahan. "Each tourist paid $50 for the 12-hour trip, he added." (Read more; subscription required) For a recent Rural Blog item on ATV damage to national forests and other federal land in the West, click here.

Moonshine bust shows industry still big in places

A big moonshine bust in southern Virginia's Piedmont has focused more attention on the industry that came with the first wave of Scots-Irish settlers and seems to be permanently imprinted in the culture of many counties in Appalachian Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.

The latest bust "wasn't little Snuffy Smith with a little old still coming out of the woods, and I'm making four gallons of liquor and me and mama are sharing it on the porch," federal agent Bart McEntire told Jerry Markon of The Washington Post. "This was putting out over 1,000 gallons of a week. That's a significant amount of liquor." The bust was in Halifax County, but the main defendant lives in Franklin County, two counties to the west.

Markon writes, "People have always enjoyed their liquor in rural Franklin County, which calls itself the 'moonshine capital of the world,' a slogan seen on billboards and T-shirts and even at a moonshine exhibit on the campus of a local Methodist college." That would be the Blue Ridge Institute and Museum at Ferrum College. (Post map by Laris Karklis)

After a crackdown about 10 years ago, authorities say "Moonshining is starting to make a comeback as moonshiners, who have been known to hide their stills behind fake headstones in cemeteries and camouflage them with green paint in the woods, adapt to the scrutiny," Markon reports. "Because moonshine is so ingrained in the culture and history of the region, the industry is clannish. Agents rarely find cooperators. Maybe once a year, they'll get a call with the precise location of a still." (Read more)

UPDATE, Sept. 6: Four men pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection with the operation, Laurence Hammack of The Roanoke Times reports: "The defendants accepted plea agreements and will be sentenced later. As part of his standard questions, Judge James Turk asked each man to explain in his own words what he did to make him guilty." (Read more)

Missouri starts trying to expand rural broadband

Missouri is organizing an effort to get broadband, or high-speed Internet service, into rural areas, and like some other states is using Kentucky as an example.

"The task force is examining a model created by the state of Kentucky," which uses a public-private partnership called ConnectKentucky, reports Rajah Maples of KQHA-TV in Hannibal (and Quincy, Ill.), citing state Sen. Wes Shoemyer. "He says that state has increased its high-speed Internet coverage by at least 40 percent in a just a matter of years." Shoemeyer is a member of the Rural High-Speed Internet Task Force created by Gov. Matt Blunt. "For rural Missouri that this is something that's critical," he told Maples.

"Shoemyer says the committee's first step is mapping out areas that don't have broadband Internet access. Then, the committee will submit those maps to the governor's office and lawmakers later next month." (Read more)

Amateur breeding, slow economy, expensive hay, lack of slaughterhouses mean neglect for horses

"Across the U.S., the number of horses whose owners won't or can't properly care for them is mushrooming," Paulo Prada reports for The Wall Street Journal. "Spurred by retiring baby boomers and their penchant for second homes in the country, horse ownership boomed in the U.S. over the past decade," to over 9 million head, up by half in a decade. "Along with the boom came backyard breeding, as owners without the discipline or financial muscle to obtain award-winning genes settled for whatever nature produced."

"As the horse population soared -- and the economy ceased to gallop -- selling the animals became more difficult. Some owners could no longer afford their investment. . . . The price of hay, the main source of horse nutrition, has more than doubled over the past year," but at the same time the last three horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. closed, exacerbating the situation. "Now, some unwanted American horses wind up at Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses. But others linger and starve, often ending up at rescue homes and other charities."

"You've got all these owners out there who thought it would be easy to keep a horse, and their incomes aren't keeping up with even their own cost of living," says Morgan Silver, founder of the Horse Protection Association of Florida (which provided this photo of her with Princess, a horse she rescued). She works around Ocala, "a hotbed of mateur breeding," Prada writes. The Indiana-based Equine Rescue League, which operates in five states, says it took in 186 horses in 2007, up 232 percent from the previous year. (Read more)

Administration lags on new coal-mine rescue rules

"The Bush administration missed a legal deadline to finalize rules to require more and better-trained mine rescue teams across the nation’s coalfields," reports Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette. The deadline for the Labor Department to act was Dec. 15. "The rules are still not finalized, and are sitting at the White House, under review by the Office of Management and Budget."

Ward writes, "Lawmakers mandated changes in the rules after questions about the nation’s mine rescue capabilities following the deaths of 19 miners in the Sago and Darby disasters and the Aracoma Mine fire, all in 2006." Congress gave the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration 18 months to enact the rules, and "MSHA took nearly all of that time — 15 months of it." After a public comment period, "MSHA submitted its final version for OMB review on Dec. 13," two days before the deadline. (Read more)

Obama worked rural papers in Iowa, and it paid off

While Barack Obama didn't run as strongly in Iowa's rural caucuses as he did statewide, his courting of rural newspapers probably helped him rack up his surprising margin of 8 percentage points. The freshman Democratic senator from Illinois was endorsed by more newspapers than any other candidate in any party -- nine, including four weeklies -- and probably benefited from the coverage that he and his staff enabled. For more detail on endorsements, click here.

"The Obama campaign developed a reputation for doing the little things as it carefully built its organization in Iowa, where personal relationships famously matter in politics. The effort to win coverage in the local media was more ambitious, by far, than anything other campaigns put together," Peter Slevin of The Washington Post's Midwest Bureau wrote in The Trail, the Post's general political blog.

Slevin's example of the attention that Obama paid to small newspapers was Douglas Burns, a columnist for the Daily Times Herald of Carroll, circulation 6,000, and a frequent writer for the Independent (shown with Obama). "He has interviewed the presidential candidate no fewer than six times, including a pair of 15-minute sessions during the crazy final days of December," Slevin wrote on caucus day, Jan. 3. "Look, they kept giving me interviews, and I thought I was putting some good questions out there," Burns told Slevin, noting that he asked Obama about his drug use as a youth. "I wasn't just rolling over. They still did interviews with me after that, which is to their credit. They kept taking the questions."

The campaign's first contact with the Herald came "in March, just weeks after Obama declared his candidacy," when one of its Iowa spokesmen came to Carroll -- population 10,000 and seat of Carroll County, 21,000 -- and met with two staffers for an hour and a half. "Those early efforts to cultivate relationships probably helped," Burns told Slevin. "When they showed us a lot of respect, I looked at it that they were showing Carroll a lot of respect."

In contrast, some small papers in Iowa reported difficulty dealing with New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, who placed a disappointing third in the Democratic caucuses. A survey by NBC News of 15 weekly and small daily papers in Iowa -- which has 272 weeklies -- found they had "mixed experiences with all the campaigns, Democratic or Republican," the NBC political unit reported in First Read. "The majority of newspapers reported being able to get a few minutes with a candidate either immediately after the event during the rope line or with a one-on-one interview. Senator Clinton was the exception in this case." (Read more) The survey was prompted by a report from by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

"Clinton spent 45 minutes at Sam's Sodas and Sandwiches in downtown Carroll with Burns, Lopez and two other reporters," Slevin reports. Burns got 15 minutes with Romney, but "Edwards made no effort to reach out to the local media during his four visits, Burns said." After writing a column headlined "Why Barack Obama will win the Iowa Caucuses," and reporting that as fact, Burns is "back to covering streets and sewers and eight-man football." (Read more)

Novel about mountaintop-removal strip mining for coal is about what we see and choose not to see

"I have tried to educate myself about mountaintop removal," Aimee Zaring reports. "I've read articles, gone to public meetings and listened to the heart-rending stories of those struggling in the Appalachian coalfields to protect their land and families from the devastating effects of strip-mining. I've seen scalped mountains in the distance while driving through the hills of Eastern Kentucky, but that's as far as I could see the problem -- from a distance. A horrifying, inconceivable concept. That is, until I read Ann Pancake's fearless and beautiful debut novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been. Not even Pancake's characters can seem to fully absorb the magnitude of what is happening in their small West Virginia town."

In a book review for The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Zaring writes, "Though there is an unmistakable agenda here -- Pancake's voice rising out against mountaintop removal, nearly every chapter spotlighting some aspect of strip-mining's destructive effects -- the story never falls into sentimentalism or didacticism. Through the unique, convincing viewpoints of multiple characters, Pancake manages to edify without preaching -- or judging. The coal companies' employees, for example, are just trying to put bread on the table, the coal companies themselves the embodiment of humanity's age-old thirst for power. And we are made to see our own culpability in each character's refusal to see, at one point or other, what they feel helpless to fix. ... Strange As This Weather Has Been is not just a story about Appalachians or mountaintop removal. It is a story about vision -- what we choose to see and not to see." (Read more)

Do Huckabee's GOP critics think he's too rural?

Republican establishmentarians thinks Mike Huckabee is "a rube straight out of Dogpatch" but most of them speak in code because "Class war is forbidden in the Republican playbook," Tim Egan writes in Outposts, his blog for The New York Times. (Photo of sign on Iowa 92 by Joshua Lott)

"Huckabee, despite an inept last week of campaigning, has forced the Republican Party to face the Wal-Mart shoppers that they have long taken advantage of," Egan writes. "He’s here. He’s Gomer. And he’s not going away. Huckabee revels in the class war. He’s Two-Buck Huck, and darn proud of it. He likes nothing better than playing the Hick from Hope. He and his wife lived in a trailer for a while, he points out. His son killed a dog one summer, 'a mangy dog' at that, as Huckabee explained to the befuddled national press corps. He said he used to eat squirrels, cooking them up in his popcorn popper. Ewwwwhhh!"

More from Egan, who once covered the rural West for the Times: "It’s okay to have faux rubes, a la Bush senior and his pork rinds, or George W. and his Midland malapropisms. But when something that looks like the real thing comes along, the Republican royalists get apoplectic. They were appalled at the recent YouTube debate because it looked like a parody of one faction of their party – complete with Bible-waving wackos, trigger-happy gun nuts and Confederate-flag enthusiasts." (Read more)

Landmark chairman says decision to sell was his

Landmark Communications Chairman Frank Batten Jr., right, said it was his decision to seek buyers for the company's assets, including Landmark Community Newspapers, a major rural publisher, Philip Walzer of the company's Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reports.

Batten said his idea was approved by other family members, including his father, Frank Batten Sr., who built the company into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. "Although Batten, who will turn 81 next month, has suffered from a number of ailments in recent years, his son described him as healthy and fully recovered from a broken hip," Walzer writes. Batten Jr. said he would avoid selling the company to “inappropriate buyers,” but did not elaborate.

Walzer tells more about the company and the prospective sale: "The several hundred shareholders include family members, some longtime employees and executives, and former Landmark workers, with about 15 individuals or personal trusts having 1 percent or more outstanding stock. The announcement, coming during a depressed period for the newspaper industry, confounded some media researchers. But John Morton, a veteran newspaper analyst and president of Morton Research Inc. in Silver Spring, Md., said the Battens might have chosen to act before profit margins erode further." Others agreed.

Here is more on the company's community-newspaper subsidiary.

Bristol Herald-Courier opposes new coal-fired power plant proposed for southwest Virginia

Though the U.S. Forest Service has dropped its opposition to Dominion Power Co.'s proposed coal-fired power plant in Wise County, Virginia, that doesn't mean the region should welcome the plant, the Bristol Herald-Courier said in an editorial this week.

"Pollution from the plant still poses a threat to the health of those who will live in its shadow. Their lives are every bit as valuable as the health of a forest 100 miles away -- even if they don’t have the clout and influence of the U.S. Forest Service to make their case," opined the 38,000-circulation Media General paper on the Tennessee- Virginia line. For a blog item on Dominion's deal with USFS, click here.

"Dominion argues that its plant will use the newest technology and be much cleaner than the older plants" in the region, the editorial says. "This is true. If the Dominion plant replaced the older plants, that might be a decent trade. But such a swap isn’t in the cards. This is addition, not subtraction. Dominion, which doesn’t even provide power to this region, wants to construct the Wise County plant to meet energy demands in fast-growing Northern Virginia."

The fight over the plant is "one of what will likely be dozens of battles between and power companies planning to build new plants in rural areas," says the Daily Yonder, which has this picture of the plant site.

Local, state officials will fight to restore 67 percent cut in federal grants for drug, other enforcement

Lobbyists for state and local officials will seek to reverse a projected 67 percent cut in federal funding "for targeted state and local criminal justice initiatives," reports Crime & Justice News. "One state official suggested that advocates argue to Congress that the unexpected funding cuts, which were negotiated in private pre-holiday legislative conference committee sessions, were unfair because they were "grossly disproportionate" compared with other federal appropriation reductions." (Read more)

The Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program "helps pay for a host of law enforcement initiatives in states and cities, including drug task forces, anti-gang units and overtime for police officers," writes John Gramlich of Stateline. "Drug enforcement agents in Arizona, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Montana, and North Carolina have warned their agencies face cuts and possible closure." For the first Rural Blog item on that, with examples, click here.

David Steingraber, president of the National Criminal Justice Association, told Stateline, “Congress has just made the job of every police officer in this country more difficult.” Gramlich adds, "The association has blamed the funding shortage on members of Congress who favored pet projects over anti-crime dollars." (Read more)

Obama and rural Iowa: signs of weakness?

Though Illinois Sen. Barack Obama won the Democratic caucuses in Iowa, one of the more rural states, he showed a relative lack of strength among rural voters, posing a challenge for him, Iowa expert Jeff Zeleny writes in The New York Times.

A detailed map of the caucus results suggests that Mr. Obama's argument was not convincing to Democrats in many rural stretches of the state," writes Zeleny, a former reporter for Iowa newspapers. "Had he not won in Iowa’s largest three counties, in addition to a strong showing along the Mississippi River in the east, the outcome would almost certainly have been different. Over the last year, Mr. Obama’s reception in rural Iowa counties seemed to steadily improve, judging by listening to more enthusiastic applause from his audiences. At many stops, though, he would face questions from conservative Democrats about gun control and immigration, and his answers did not always meet the approval of voters."

But Obama did get many rural votes, at least one from a man who was turned off by what may have been racial or ethnic prejudice against him, Zeleny reports. He quotes an e-mail from a woman in a rural area whose husband was originally for Hillary Clinton: "He changed before the count as he heard people stating they could not vote for someone with a last name like Obama," and "heard not one negative bit of talk" in the Obama preference group at the caucus. (Read more)

McCain leads in rural counties in New Hampshire

John McCain doesn't have a clear lead in the New Hampshire Republican primary but is clearly the favorite in the Granite State's rural counties, according to a 7News-Suffolk University poll released yesterday. See updates below. (Photo: Barbara Davidson, Los Angeles Times)

The Jan. 3-4 poll found Mitt Romney, former governor of adjoining Massachusetts, leading the Arizona senator 30 percent to 26 percent, within the poll's error margin of 4.4 percentage points for each result. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani each had 11 percent. McCain had surged to a clear, 9-point lead a week ago.

In Rockingham and Hillsborough counties -- the urbanized southeast and the Boston media market -- Romney led McCain 39 percent to 20 percent in the latest poll. In the more rural counties to the west and north, McCain led Romney, 30 to 20. "It would seem that the voters in the two counties that border Massachusetts have adopted . . . Romney as their favorite son,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said in a release. Giuliani and Huckabee ran about the same in rural and urban areas.

There were no statistically significant rural-urban differences among candidates in the Democratic primary, in which New York Sen. Hillary Clinton had 36 percent to 29 percent for a surging Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and 13 percent for former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. For details, click here.

UPDATES: McCain leads Romney 33 to 27 percent in the latest University of New Hampshire poll for WMUR-TV and CNN, taken yesterday and today. Three days ago, they were tied. Obama and Clinton are tied at 33 percent, with Edwards at 20 percent. The poll's error margin is plus or minus 5 percent. (Read more) The Concord Monitor reports that its polling yesterday and today shows McCain leading Romney, 35 to 29 percent, and Obama leading Clinton, 34 to 33 percent -- all within the poll's error margin of 5 percentage points for each result. Read blog post from 4:13 p.m.; story is pending as of 7:25 p.m.

San Angelo editor emeritus, sacked, hits media biz

Today was Perry Flippin's last day as editor emeritus and columnist at the San Angelo Standard-Times, a 25,000-circulation daily in west-central Texas. In his final column yesterday, he attacked the industry in which he had worked for 42 years, saying it no longer emphasizes public service. We're glad the E.W. Scripps Co. paper has kept the column online. It's headlined "Columnist caught up in newspapers' changing times."

"Today, instead of serving primarily as watchdogs, we deliver entertainment fodder interspersed with glitzy ads for consumers. The newspaper's value is measured not by how well it reflects and elevates its community, but by how much money it makes," Flippin wrote.

"How do CEOs earn fat bonuses? In part, by putting loyal and talented employees such as me on the street. As an owner of company stock, I am conflicted. Without drastic measures, the value of my stock will plummet. Yet the salvation of newspapers may come only when Wall Street gets out of the news biz and puts presses back in the hands of private owners -- as it was before this roller coaster ride began." (Read more) For more on Flippin's career, from The Associated Press, click here.

Reducing farms' fertilizer runoff has big price tag

Major reductions in fertilizer runoff from farm fields in Iowa, to help the state's waterways, the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, would cost 41 percent more than current measures, according to a study by Iowa State University.

Perry Beeman of The Des Moines Register writes, "It would cost $613 million per year to cut farm-field phosphorus runoff by 40 percent and nitrates by 25 percent," as the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed. The study by ISU's Center for Agricultural and Rural Development "also found that the seven most common conservation techniques already used in Iowa cost a combined $435 million a year."

"Water quality has become a huge issue in Iowa," where streams "have some of the highest fertilizer concentrations in the world, leaving the water green with algae and with a lower diversity of fish than clean water would support," Beeman writes. "EPA is requiring states to come up with the nation's first limits on nitrogen and phosphorus, which occur naturally and also are main ingredients of fertilizer. . . . Nitrates are a health threat at high levels in drinking water, and cause a low-oxygen 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico each summer. Phosphorus feeds algae blooms that can stress or kill fish when the algae suck up oxygen as they decompose." (Read more)

Indiana county considers restrictions on confined and concentrated animal feeding operations

Delaware County, Indiana (county seat: Muncie) is considering tighter controls on confined and concentrated animal feeding operations, both known as CAFOs. The proposed new category, "intense farming," prompted some intense objections from farmers at a local planning commission hearing last night.

“Agriculture is under attack,” said Joe Russell, a farmer and member of the county council. “The confidence and trust in farmers is no longer there. It seems like we’re being attacked quite a bit.” He said the change would amount to Indiana's tightest restrictions on CAFOs and prevent any more from being established in the county, reports Seth Slabaugh of The Star Press.

The story didn't mention any arguments for the proposal, but a photo caption said Marita Fields of Albany, a town of 2,400 near Jay and Randolph counties, was "concerned about the property value of the rental home she owns." (Read more)

Isolated county involves residents in economic plan

As our Encarta map illustrates, Phillipsburg, Kan., population 2,668, might be deemed in the middle of nowhere. But its residents seem to take the attitude that they're in the middle of everywhere, and a recent project called Discover Phillips County offers some lessons and encouragement for isolated, rural communities that want to maintain and improve their quality of life and spur economic development.

They had some help, from the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University and the Dane G. Hansen Foundation in Logan, pop. 603, also in Phillips County. A man who served on the boards of both entities got the foundation to give the institute a grant to prepare a new model for community development in the county, based on leadership and entrepreneurship.

The project included two components: Outreach to entrepreneurs and a county-wide community engagement process," Institute Director Ron Wilson writes. "Hundreds of citizens came to meetings at the Huck Boyd Community Center and provided great input on their hopes and goals for the future. A core group of volunteers stepped forward to serve on the steering committee for Discover Phillips County. They developed a vision statement and identified strategic focus areas plus action steps to be implemented. One goal was a county-wide cleanup implemented in spring 2007." (Read more)

Rural votes are key to Huckabee's victory in Iowa

Iowa's rural counties were very important to Republican Mike Huckabee's victory in last night's presidential caucuses. They gave him 59 percent of his votes, a much higher share than his foes got in rural Iowa, according to a compilation and chart by Bill Bishop and Julie Ardery of The Daily Yonder. "Huckabee won the state with 34 percent of the vote. But, geographically, his success was uneven," they write. "Huckabee won 38 percent of the rural vote. In urban counties, however, he won just 30 percent."

In the Democratic race, winner Barack Obama's votes came mainly from urban counties, while Hillary Clinton and, especially, John Edwards got most of their votes from rural counties. "Obama, the young Illinois senator from Chicago, won rural Iowa, but he did considerably better in the cities," Bishop and Ardery report. Obama got 34 percent of the rural vote, while Edwards had 32 percent and Clinton 31 percent.

The Yonder counts nine of Iowa's 99 counties as urban. They have a little less than half the state's population. For more figures and analysis, and caucus reporting from a small newspaper in northern Iowa, click here.

Peter Shinn of Brownfield Network reports that both winners touched on agriculture issues in their victory speeches, but Huckabee had more to say: "One of the country's greatest needs is to make sure that we not only can fuel ourselves, but we can feed ourselves, and that's why farmers in states like your's and mine are important. I don't want us to have to wait until we have to let the Chinese send food over to us. My friends, if you think it's bad to depend on foreign oil, wait until this country messes up and has to depend on foreign food - that should never happen in the United States of America!" (Read more)

Landmark, a leading rural publisher, explores sale

The Batten family that owns Landmark Communications Inc. of Norfolk is exploring a sale of its assets, including Landmark Community Newspapers Inc., one of the nation's largest publishers of rural newspapers.

“We are exploring strategic alternatives, and that can entail a number of possibilities, one of which is the sale of the company’s businesses,” Richard Barry III, the parent firm's vice chairman, told The Virginian-Pilot, the company's flagship paper. It also owns The News and Record of Greensboro, N.C., and The Roanoke Times. "Officials are holding a series of meetings this afternoon with Virginian-Pilot employees to discuss plans to explore selling the Norfolk-based company," Bill Choyke, Jim Washington and Philip Walzer write for the Norfolk daily, quoting an e-mail from Chairman Frank Batten Jr.: "At this early stage, we cannot speculate on where this process will lead."

Landmark's best known and most profitable property is The Weather Channel, "one of the last privately owned cable channels in the United States," they write. (Read more) "It ranked 42nd in total viewers among all advertising-supported cable networks" during the third quarter, reports Jon Lafayette of TV Week. The channel's Web site, Weather.com, had more than 32 million unique users in November, making it the 18th largest media site by traffic, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

The company's community newspaper subsidiary, based in Shelbyville, Ky., has "54 paid newspapers in 13 states, 40 free newspapers and shoppers, 16 offset commercial printing plants, seven collegiate sports publications, and 30 special publications such as real estate guides and homes magazines," according to its Web site. The papers are known for their quality and local editorial autonomy.

UPDATE, Jan. 4: The sale of Landmark's papers would be "the largest sale of Kentucky media properties" ever, as far as the number of markets affected, Al Cross of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues tells Jim Jordan of the Lexington Herald-Leader. The Herald-Leader map shows LCNI has 17 weeklies, a daily and a publication that follows University of Kentucky sports. More Cross, via Jordan: "Landmark's Kentucky newspapers would probably be sold as a group because they are clustered in adjoining counties to reduce business costs, such as printing, he said. 'The most immediate threat' to strong news coverage would occur, Cross added, if a new owner decided to consolidate news operations and report news for several local papers from only one location. 'These are distinctive local editorial voices, which I think is important,' he said. 'If you run into clustering and consolidation on the editorial side to save money, there is probably going to be a decline in quality.'" (Read more)

Iowa caucuses put spotlight on farm and rural vote

Our friends at the Center for Rural Strategies got some great play for their seven-month-old poll in today's Wall Street Journal. Previewing today's Iowa caucuses, reporter Amy Chozick used the survey to show that "rural states may be most receptive to the Democrat who wins the nomination." That would be a shift from the last two elections, in which President Bush's margin among rural voters was key to his victories.

Chozick reports two reasons for the shift: Democratic support for a Farm Bill that includes "controls on big agribusiness companies and subsidies for farmers," and the poll's finding that "nearly 60 percent of all rural U.S. citizens are close to, or related to, someone serving in Iraq." For such people, "This is not a television war, " Chris Peterson, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, told the reporter. For the pollsters' memo about the survey, click here.

Chozick reports that former Sen. John Edwards has "the advantage for farm votes" in Iowa. "He draws huge support in agricultural areas, where fans relate to his background and anti-corporate message," she writes, but adds, "Mr. Edwards's opponents aren't ceding the rural turf." New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has farmers from her state touring Iowa to say how she has helped them, and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama "has introduced a package of farm- and rural-development policies, including plans to rejuvenate rural communities by cultivating alternative energies such as wind farms and ethanol." But she adds, "Mr. Obama raised eyebrows in Adel when he asked a crowd of poor farmers: 'Anybody gone into a Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?' The upscale organic-supermarket chain doesn't have a single store in Iowa." (Read more; subscription may be required)

Bill bolstering Freedom of Information Act is law

President Bush has signed a bill strengthening the federal Freedom of Information Act. The legislation could prove especially helpful to rural news outlets, because it creates an independent ombudsman to resolve disputes without legal action.

The bill, S. 2488, also creates a tracking system for FOIA requests, makes it easier for requesters to recover legal costs when agencies improperly deny requests, limits fees agencies can charge when time limits for a response are not met, requires agencies to explain which exemptions to disclosure are being used to justify deletions from records, and requires reports to Congress that will help oversight committees judge the effectiveness of executive-branch performance.

The bill defines "representative of the news media" as "any person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the public, uses its editorial skills to turn the raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience. In this clause, the term 'news' means information that is about current events or that would be of current interest to the public. ... A freelance journalist shall be regarded as working for a news-media entity if the journalist can demonstrate a solid basis for expecting publication through that entity, whether or not the journalist is actually employed by the entity. A publication contract would present a solid basis for such an expectation; the Government may also consider the past publication record of the requester in making such a determination."

Bush signed the bill without comment, other than a brief summary from his press office.

Southern Political Report poll suggests 15% rule, rural skew will give Edwards victory in Iowa

Add to the list of dueling polls in Iowa one from Southern Political Report, which suggests a victory for former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards in Thursday night's Democratic presidential caucuses, partly on the basis of strength among rural voters.

The Jan. 28-29 poll had Edwards trailing New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, 30 to 29 percent, but SPR reports, "Critically, Edwards was the second choice of 62 percent of those who supported other candidates that did not receive the required 15 percent of the vote." (In most precincts, those with four or more delegates, voters can switch if their candidate doesn't reach 15 percent.) Using "reallocation methodology" that it said predicted the results of the 2004 caucuses, SPR said that if this round had been held Dec. 29, Edwards would have received 41 percent of the vote, with Clinton at 34 percent and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama at 25.

Matt Towery, CEO of Insider Advantage, which publishes SPR, said the delegate allocation in the caucuses "gives rural areas, where Edwards is running strong, the opportunity to have a disproportionately significant impact on the ultimate outcome. Regardless of geographic areas of support, the Edwards ‘second choice’ percentage has remained well over 50 percent since we first released a second-choice survey in early December."

Towery, an ex-Republican activist, said he was "not comfortable releasing numbers" from SPR's poll of Republican caucusgoers. "I’ve seen enough GOP polls in 28 years to know when some sort of shift is taking place," he said. "The Republican numbers right now are all over the place and, in my experience, that means the numbers probably won’t settle until immediately prior to the voting." (Read more)

"What's clear from being on the ground here in Iowa is that Edwards's surge over the past week is real," writes Chris Cilizza in The Washington Post's political blog, The Trail. "Edwards is also relying heavily on his personal story -- his father's work in a mill, his humble upbringing -- to speak to rural voters who are already inclined to be for him. Edwards appears to be be running strongest in rural areas in the western part of the state." Cilizza analyzes other campaigns, too. (Read more)

Fundamentalists, small towns keep Huckabee ahead in Iowa, Des Moines Register's last poll says

On the strength of rural and small-town voters, but also with support from metro areas, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee had a marginal lead in The Des Moines Register's final Iowa Poll before the Jan. 3 Republican presidential caucuses. (Register chart)

Huckabee had 32 percent of likely caucusgoers, to 26 percent for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 13 percent for Arizona Sen. John McCain and 9 percent each for former Sen. Fred Thompson and Rep. Ron Paul. The poll's margin of error was 3.5 percentage points, so Huckabee's lead was within the margin. The error margins for geographic subsamples were much greater, but the results do indicate the sources of each candidate's support. Small towns were Huckabee's main base; in them, he led Romney 36-25. Among rural residents, he led Romney 30-26; in metro areas, 31-26. The race was tightest in small cities: Huckabee 29, Romney 28.

The key to Huckabee's lead is "born-again or fundamentalist Christians," reports the Register's Jonathan Roos. Almost half of Republican caucusgoers fit that category, and among them, "Huckabee outpolls Romney, 47 percent to 20 percent. Romney has faced questions about his religious standing as a Mormon. Among those who think it's more important for the next president to be a social conservative than a fiscal conservative, Huckabee leads Romney 48 percent to 24 percent. "

There was no major trend during the Dec. 27-30 polling period, but some observers, such as the Register's David Yepsen, think Huckabee slipped badly today with a "goofy press conference ... in which he promised not to run attack ads against Mitt Romney while producing them and showing them to reporters anyway. " (Read more) Roos reports, "The poll shows there remains enough indecision among likely caucus participants to scramble both the race for first place between Huckabee and Romney, and the battle for third. Nearly one-half of caucusgoers say they could still be persuaded to support another candidate." (Read more)

Obama leads in Register's final poll, appears to take Iowa's small towns; Edwards has rural areas

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama had a marginal lead in The Des Moines Register's final Iowa Poll before Thursday's presidental caucuses, with 32 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers. The poll found Obama leading in small towns, small cities and metropolitan areas but trailing former Sen. John Edwards among rural residents. Edwards and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton were virtually tied in the poll, with 24 and 25 percent, respectively. However, during the Dec. 27-30 polling period, support for Clinton declined while support for Edwards increased. (Register graph)

The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, so while Obama probably led during the polling period, that is not a statistical certainty -- contrary to the suggestion in the Register's story, which said Obama had "a lead larger than the survey's margin of sampling error." Error margins apply to each result, not the difference between two results.

The newspaper did not give the sample sizes of error margins for its temporal or geographic subsamples, but by definition their error margins would be much larger. The results among rural residents were Edwards 30, Clinton 25, Obama 24. Obama's other results were 32 percent in small towns, 35 percent in small cities and 37 percent in metro areas. In small cities, Edwards and Clinton were tied at 25; in the other categories, Clinton was running second and Edwards third. Clinton took issue with the poll, noting that 40 percent of the respondents were independents, and the Register's David Yepsen sounded skeptical.

The polling trend shows Edwards with the greatest current momentum, and his increasingly strong, populist message is aimed mainly at small-town and rural voters, reports Dan Balz, chief political writer for The Washington Post. "It is a call to arms that is raw and angry, populist and pugnacious. It is a message that is as exhausting as it is confrontational. It is a message that makes Al Gore's 'people versus the powerful' seem timid by comparison," Balz writes. "One Edwards supporter, departing after a big rally in Des Moines on Saturday night, said he hasn't heard a message as passionate or strong since Bobby Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign. . . . That message is strong brew and not for everyone, but it has found a following. Edwards is counting on enough Iowans -- those in small towns and rural areas especially -- to buy into it to put him over the top on caucus night." (Read more)

Meanwhile, Obama said in a Dec. 30 conference call with family farmers that he had been more consistent on agricultural and rural policy than Edwards, and made a subtle dig at the fact Clinton's rural organization "is headed by a large scale pork producer of the kind that family farmers want better controls placed upon," reports Al Giordano in his blog, The Field. Giordano also questions the validity of polling in Iowa at a time when many caucusgoers, according to reporting by Balz, have stopped answering their phones because of the onslaught from campaigns and pollsters. (Read more)

All-terrain vehicles damaging national forests

"Federally owned lands are rapidly being transformed into the new playgrounds — and battlegrounds — of the American West. Outdoor enthusiasts are flocking in record numbers to lesser-known forests, deserts and mountains, where the rules of use have been lax and enforcement infrequent," Felicity Barringer and William Yardley report for The New York Times.

"The federal government has been struggling to come up with plans to accommodate the growing numbers of off-highway vehicles — mostly with proposed maps directing them toward designated trails — but all-terrain-vehicle users have started formidable lobbying campaigns when favorite trails have been left off the maps. Even with the plans, federal officials describe an almost impossible enforcement situation because the government does not begin to have the manpower to deal with those who will not follow the rules."

From Durango, Colo., the writers add, "The temptation to go off-trail, legally or not, comes from the desire for variety, federal land managers say. 'The more a route is used, the less challenging it becomes,' said Mark Stiles, the San Juan [National] Forest supervisor. 'You end up getting lots of little spurs off the main route.' Even a few errant riders, he said, 'can do a lot of damage.'" (Read more)

Lack of state trauma systems kills rural Americans

Rural Americans are dying from accidents because their states lack systems to designate hospitals to treat trauma victims, Laura Ungar reports today in The Courier-Journal.

"Trauma systems are designed to get injured patients the care they need as quickly as possible within a 'golden hour' in which survival is more likely," Ungar writes for the Louisville newspaper. "In states with trauma systems, more hospitals are encouraged to develop certain levels of expertise, paramedics and emergency medical technicians are trained in where to take patients, medical professionals coordinate services and a registry tracks trends."

States without trauma systems are Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin. Indiana and Alabama recently started state systems. For a detailed, state-by-state rundown from the American College of Surgeons, click here.

Ungar reports that a bill to start a system in Kentucky "faces obstacles -- legislators wary of spending the millions it would require, rural hospitals concerned about the costs of becoming trauma centers and already-overburdened rural doctors worried that their on-call workloads would increase." (Read more)

Obama, Huckabee may ride rural-newspaper endorsements to victories in Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses

Rural newspaper favorites Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama would win the Iowa caucuses if they were held tonight, say the latest "power rankings" of the Iowa Independent, an online news site that is our favorite source of grass-roots information on Hawkeye State politics.

The Independent knows rural Iowa, and says Obama's "wave of small-town newspaper endorsements should enhance his second-choice support in rural parts of the state where he has been perceived as weak." Second choices are important because supporters of a candidate who doesn't get at least 15 percent of the vote in a precinct can then caucus for someone else. The Independent's rankings have Hillary Clinton and John Edwards tied for second.

[This paragraph was updated Dec. 30.] In the Republican race, which has no 15 percent rule, Huckabee had five newspaper endorsements, three from weeklies. John McCain had four dailies and two weeklies; Mitt Romney had three dailies and Fred Thompson had one, the Ottumwa Courier. For a listing of all the endorsements and the newspapers' circulations, click here.

The Independent's rankings put Romney in second and Ron Paul in third. Chase Martyn (in photo below) writes, "Paul broke double digits in at least two polls for the first time this week and he seems particularly strong in areas of the state where the media has less of an impact on political deliberations -- especially in rural northwest and southern Iowa." Because rural precincts tend to be smaller, the rural vote in the caucuses is amplified. For an Independent story on that by John Deeth, click here.

The Independent is spotlighted in the January issue of Wired magazine, in a story about Iowa blogs that quotes former Des Moines Register reporter Chuck Offenburger: "Many times I notice, like with the Iowa Independent or smaller papers, they'll be out in front of the media on some campaign appearance, and then the larger media then works their way around to it."

Sarah Lai Stirland writes, "Founded eight months ago, the Iowa Independent is staffed with a motley mix of part-time contributing bloggers and more-established local writers. Its sole full-time employee is Martyn -- a former Democratic field coordinator and student political blogger who graduated from Grinnell College earlier this year."

The Independent is one of four state political blogs "funded by the Center for Independent Media, a nonprofit group headed by former Wired magazine writer David Bennahum," Stirland writes. The others are Colorado Confidential, Michigan Messenger and Minnesota Monitor. (Read more)

Study suggests farm women who apply pesticides put themselves at greater risk of getting asthma

If you're a farm woman who applies pesticides, you appear to have a much greater chance of developing allergic asthma -- especially if you didn't grow up on a farm. Those are the headline results from the first study of the subject, published in January of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society.

The study looked at 25,814 farm women in North Carolina and Iowa, more than half of whom applied pesticides. It "found an average increase of 50 percent in the prevalence of allergic asthma in all farm women who applied or mixed pesticides," says Newswise, a research-reporting service.

About 40 percent of the women in the study did not grow up on a farm. Their greater risk of developing asthma from pesticide application is "due to a protective effect that remains poorly understood," Newswise says. "Growing up on a farm is such a huge protective effect it's pretty hard to overwhelm it," said Dr. Jane Hoppin of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and lead author of the study.

The study "found that most pesticides were associated only with allergic asthma, even though non-allergic asthma is generally more common in adults," Newswise reports. "Even some commonly used pesticides were associated with a marked increase in allergic asthma prevalence. Malathion, for example, a widely used insecticide, was associated with a 60 percent increased prevalence of allergic asthma."

Because the study was a cross-section of data collected from physicians' reports in the 1990s, the researchers cannot definitively say that using pesticides causes asthma. They are planning a large-scale study that will better evaluate the linkage. To read or download the current study, click here.

U.S. coal production down 1.4% from last year, mainly due to 3.6% drop in Central Appalachia

U.S. coal production dropped 1.4 percent this year, largely because of significant declines in Central Appalachia, according to the Energy Information Administration.

As of Dec. 15, production in Virginia was down 10.2 percent from 2006, to 25.8 million tons. Kentucky production was down 5.2 percent, to 110.8 million tons. In the entire Appalachian coalfield, "production dipped 3.6 percent to 364.6 million tons," The Associated Press reported.

Production in southern West Virginia, which comes from many of the same seams as those in Eastern Kentucky, declined 0.4 percent to 105.5 million tons. "Northern West Virginia mines increased output during the period 4.1 percent to 42.6 million tons," AP reported. "In Wyoming, the nation's biggest producer, production is up 1.6 percent to 433.1 million tons."

AP added, "U.S. coal producers faced weak demand from electric utilities and stagnant prices for much of the year. More recently, however, international demand for coal used to generate electricity and to make coke for steel manufacturers has spurred exports, particularly to Europe and South America." To read the EIA reports, click here.

Giuliani and Oxycontin: How much influence?

Last month, we heard from columnist Don McNay that "The mainstream media [have] ignored how [Rudy] Giuliani made his living. Helping a company that sold addictive drugs is worse than being married a few times." McNay started writing about that in May. Today, The New York Times tells the story of the presidential candidate and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of the painkiller Oxycontin (in photo by Toby Talbot of The Associated Press).

"His work for Purdue, the company’s first and longest-running client, provides a window into how he used his standing as an eminent lawyer, a Republican insider and a national celebrity to aid a controversial client and build a business fortune," Barry Meier and Eric Lipton write of Giuliani Partners, the consulting firm of the former New York mayor and U.S. attorney.

They start their story with his final phone call last year to John Brownlee, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, who was about to bring charges against the company and three executives for "perhaps the most aggressive promotional campaign for a high-powered narcotic ever undertaken. It promoted the drug not only to pain specialists, but to family doctors with little experience in treating serious pain or recognizing drug abuse. As a result of the expanded access, critics charged, OxyContin wound up in the high schools and street corners of rural America where curious teenagers crushed the pill, defeating the time-release formula, and ended up addicts, or in some cases, dead."

From June to October 2006, Brownlee and Giuliani met or spoke six times. In the last of those conversations, the prosecutor told Giuliani "that he expected to ask for a grand jury indictment by the end of the month. Plea discussions ensued and Mr. Brownlee ultimately agreed that the three executives would not have to do jail time. . . . After years of denial and a high-profile public relations campaign, the company was forced to admit that it had misled doctors and patients. But to the parents of young people who had died getting high on OxyContin, the absence of jail time was evidence of Mr. Giuliani’s influence."

Not so, U.S. District Judge James Jones said when he accepted the plea agreement, which fined the company and the executives $634 million. “It has been implied that because Mr. Giuliani is a prominent national politician, Purdue may have received a favorable deal from the government solely because of politics,” he said. “I completely reject this claim.” (Read more)

Tama County, Iowa, bucks trend of rural decline

At least one Iowa county is bucking the trend of rural population decline in the state, thanks to low housing prices, government-backed home loans and relative proximity to urban hubs, reports Ken Black of the Times-Republican in Marshalltown, in the county to the west.

"Tama County is seeing an increase in population among those whose ages range from 15 to 49, a key demographic of economic health," Black writes, quoting Lindi Roelofse, executive director of the Tama County Economic Development Commission: "We really believe at least part of this may be attributed to the fact that relative to some of the surrounding counties, starter homes are cheaper, specifically in Tama County. Also, there are a lot of programs out there to help first-time home buyers."

Black notes that some of those programs, such as those under the Rural Development umbrella of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are available only in rural areas, and every town in the county is eligible for them. "Because of that, the county can be very attractive to young families who may be looking to purchase real estate, especially for the first time," he writes, also crediting the county's low cost of living and its location, "25 to 35 miles from an urban hub such as Marshalltown, Cedar Falls, Waterloo, or Cedar Rapids." The county seat of Toledo is at the junction of US 30 and 63, 23 miles north of Interstate 80. (Read more)

Mine plan pits Alaska traditions vs. modern culture

Karl Vick of The Washington Post reports from Nondalton, Alaska (near center of Encarta map): "The gold mine proposed for this stunning open country might be the largest in North America. It would involve building the biggest dam in the world at the headwaters of the world's largest sockeye salmon fishery, which it would risk obliterating. Epic even by Alaskan standards, the planned Pebble Mine has divided a state normally enthusiastic about extracting whatever value can be found in its wide-open spaces."

The proposal by Northern Dynasty Minerals of Vancouver and Anglo-American Corp. also has serious implications for the rural culture of the area. Vick writes, "By tradition and law, natives have the run of the area for the moose, caribou and most of all the salmon that provide sustenance in a place hundreds of miles from the nearest road. But the outside world moves closer with each generation, and appetites change. The only food on the table where [Olga] Balluta sat were oily paper pouches of french fries hand carried on an airplane from a McDonald's in Anchorage. Lined up on the counter behind were jumbo containers of Hills Bros. coffee, CoffeeMate and Lucky Charms. "That's all they learn to eat now," she told Vick, referring to local children. Her favorite foods are bear fat and fish gut salad.

"The mining companies count on that change, dangling the prospect of cash incomes even while bowing deeply to traditions that no native consciously rejects," Vick reports, quoting company spokesman Sean McGee: "If we can't show to the satisfaction of the local people that we can protect the fisheries, we will not advance this project. We have no interest in replacing one resource with another, and we understand the burden of proof is ours." (Read more)

Va. coalfield congressman predicts greenhouse-gas limits, coupled with carbon-capture funding

The Democratic congressman for southwest Virginia, which includes part of the Appalachian coalfield, is telling local newspapers that Congress is "virtually certain" to enact limits on greenhouse gases in the next three years, and he will be part of the effort.

"Ninth District U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher has announced his intention to author legislation that will both mandate the reduction of greenhouse gases and ensure a viable coal economy for years to come," reports Keith Strange of The Coalfield Progress in Norton. Boucher told the weekly newspaper, "My goal is to have a meaningful control on greenhouse gas emissions, while at the same time enabling a growth in the use of coal."

"While some people may consider the two goals mutually exclusive," Strange writes, "the congressman said new technology could make coal mining much more environmentally friendly. ... The technology, commonly referred to as “carbon capture,” is not currently commercially feasible, but Boucher said he plans to put the strength of the federal government behind research into the process," which would funnel carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants into underground rock formations or other reservoirs. (Read more)

McCain rides events and endorsements, including a chain of weeklies in rural New Hampshire

When John McCain passed up the Ames Straw Poll last summer, "It was not difficult to find Iowans who proclaimed the Arizona senator's campaign dead in the water," writes Lynda Waddington of the Iowa Independent. "Recent events, including newspaper endorsements and an assassination on the other side of the globe, have prompted some Iowans to give McCain a second look." (Independent photo)

Mary McEniry of Marion told Waddington, "With the [Benazir Bhutto] assassination today, that just made me think that we need somebody really strong, and he's the one." Waddington reports, "The assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister was at the top of McCain's list when he offered his prepared remarks." (Read more)

Michael Shear of The Washington Post reported yesterday, "McCain still trails in Iowa -- most polls peg his support in the single digits -- in part because of his opposition to ethanol subsidies and his support of immigration reform. But armed with an endorsement from the Des Moines Register and buoyed by his success in New Hampshire, McCain on Wednesday launched a three-day tour of Iowa's rural towns."

Today, McCain returned to New Hampshire, where he has keyed on rural votes. In his comeback since hit campaign hit bottom in early fall, "McCain also worked hard to win endorsements from the state's leading papers, seeing it as a no-cost strategy for building support." Shear reports. "Aides even pursued the Salmon Press chain of small weeklies, inviting its editors to ride on the bus." (Read more) The chain endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Access to its sites requires a subscription; for a story by James Pindell of The Boston Globe on its endorsement, click here.

Congress cuts local drug task force funds by 2/3

Drug-enforcement efforts in many rural areas are likely to suffer from a 67 percent cut in a federal grant program, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports today, in a story that seems ripe for replicating in most jurisdictions around the country. (For an example, see this story by Tom Joyce of the Mt. Airy News in North Carolina.)

The budget bill that Congress passed last week has $170 million for the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program, which got $520 million in the last fiscal year, reports the Herald-Leader's Cassonrda Kirby, quoting the executive director of the Kentucky Narcotics Officers' Association and David Steingraber, president of the National Criminal Justice Association.

Kirby writes, "The loss of grant money will mean disaster for small task forces, said Van Ingram, with the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy. For those that manage to remain open, the cuts will severely limit their abilities, he said. 'You can't do drug investigations without money for informants, money for overtime and money for salaries.' David Gilbert, director of the Lake Cumberland Area Drug Task Force, which serves Pulaski, McCreary and Wayne counties, said 75 percent of the task force's budget comes from the grant. He says he doesn't know whether the Lake Cumberland task force will survive the cuts. In the past year, Gilbert said, [it] has worked more than 300 felony drug cases. Two years ago, the task force helped make the first seizure of liquid methamphetamine coming into Kentucky on a plane." (Read more)