Secret to Starbucks’ success decoded in new book.

Robert SchroederMarketWatch

WASHINGTON — Health care, job creation and tackling the gaping U.S. budget deficit await both President Barack Obama and lawmakers upon their return to Washington, getting the new year and new decade off to an intense start with a sharp focus on eco-nomic issues.

With midterm congressional elections coming up later this year, the heat is on Democrats in par-ticular to deliver as the economy begins to crawl out of recession.

The health care overhaul,

Obama’s top domestic priority, will be front and center when law-makers return to work in earnest in the middle of the month. On Dec. 24, the Senate passed its plan to revamp the health care system, which seeks to extend insurance to millions of Americans and bar insurers from denying coverage to the sick.

Senate and House lawmakers must now hammer out a com-promise version of the legislation, which Obama wants to sign before his State of the Union address. Re-publicans have vowed to continue their fight against the bill. Leader-ship and committee chairs will be

discussing the process for con-ference this week, said Stepha-nie Lundberg, a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

Obama’s State of the Union speech is likely to be in the first days of February, and in it the president is expected to take on the $1.4 trillion U.S. bud-get deficit. The White House is backing a bipartisan commis-sion to cut federal borrowing, and Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag has said the ad-ministration will offer ways to

MUSTANG DAILYCALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC STATE UNIVERSITY

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Men’s and women’s basketball square

off against Big West opponents.

Gov. Schwarzenegger faces new lame-duck status

Congress tasked with multiple economic issues Michael Rothfeld

los angeles tiMes

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — No self-respecting politician wants to be one. The phrase itself is utterly demeaning. But with a year left in office, there are signs that Califor-nia Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has begun his transformation into a lame duck.

This status, defined by the weak-ness of a politician whose term will soon expire, may be difficult to swallow for a former Mr. Universe known to legions of moviegoers for vanquishing opponents as Her-cules, Conan and the Terminator. Even as a pregnant man in “Junior,” Schwarzenegger reflected a particu-lar kind of strength.

But legislators already have begun

sensing that as a lame duck he is easy prey and have openly disregarded some of his wishes. Members of his staff have steadily been quitting, and replacements are hard to come by. Schwarzenegger himself has stopped curtailing his famous mischievous streak. More of all this is probable in the year ahead.

The question for Schwarzenegger is whether he will focus his energy on resolving California’s renewed budget crisis or take a more passive approach and spend his time on a publicity tour around the state or the globe to burnish his legacy, said Bill Whalen, who was a speechwriter for California Gov. Pete Wilson.

“He is by definition a lame duck, but being a lame duck does not

see Lame duck, page 2

Campus construction ongoing as campus activities resume

see Economy, page 2

UU Plaza RenovationConstruction in the University Union Plaza began in June

2009. It is funded by money from Associated Students Inc. reserves. The UU is set to reopen in April 2010 with an up-graded stage, landscaping and seating area. The total project budget is $4,478,000.

Rec Center Expansion Seventy-five percent of the students who

voted in a February 2008 referendum ap-proved a $65 increase to the Student Union fee per quarter to fund the Cal Poly Rec Center expansion.The fee increase will not go into effect until the expansion project is estimated to be completed in June 2012. The total project budget is $71,128,000.

Investigation of state dinner finds a third un-

invited person.

IN WIRE, 3

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Christopher HintonMarketWatch

NEW YORK — Federal of-ficials intend to increase security for international flights to the U.S. starting Monday, increasing gate pat-downs and bag searches in re-sponse to the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight over the Christmas holiday.

The “enhanced” security mea-sures will be particularly acute for passengers traveling from nations deemed by the U.S. as “state spon-sors of terrorism” or “other coun-tries of interest,” the Transporta-tion Security Administration said in its latest release.

Those other countries include some that Washington considers its allies against Islamist extremism, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, according to media reports. It also includes the four nations the U.S. has formally designated sponsors of terrorism:

Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.Altogether, there are 14 coun-

tries that the U.S. considers poten-tially dangerous for airlines.

“New directive includes long-term, sustainable security measures developed in consultation with law-enforcement officials and our domestic and international part-ners,” the TSA said in a release is-sued Sunday.

In an earlier release, the De-partment of Homeland Security said the TSA would increase pat-downs and bag searches at airport security gates, as well as require passengers to stow more personal items, turn of electronic equip-ment and remain seated during certain portions of flights. There have also been media reports that passengers have to return blankets and pillows before their aircraft begins to descend. In addition, TSA checkpoints will begin using the latest screen-

ing technologies as well as “threat-based” and random screening for passengers on international flights destined for U.S. airports. On Dec. 25, a 23-year-old Ni-gerian man reportedly tried to de-stroy a Northwest flight bound for Detroit from Amsterdam by set-ting off an explosive device in his pants. The device failed, resulting in a fire, and the man was quickly subdued. Fallout from the attack has been fierce, with President Barack Obama ordering a full review of security procedures in the face of legislators’ complaints. Northwest is a unit of Delta Air Lines.

Stricter airport-security measures enforced in U.S.

mean that you have to sit back and let the situation overwhelm you,” Whalen said.

Schwarzenegger took a jaunt through the Middle East and Eu-rope in November and flew to a climate conference in Copenhagen last month while aides were dealing with a $20 billion deficit. If that pat-tern continues, Schwarzenegger will have to fit it into a busy schedule. Besides the budget, he is expected to campaign for a system of open po-litical primaries on the state ballot in June and an $11 billion bond mea-sure slated for November.

“Gov. Schwarzenegger is going to approach this year no different than any other, with an aggressive agenda to fix what’s broken in the state,” said his spokesman, Matt Da-vid. “He’s proven time and again that he can get stuff done even during difficult times.”

That Schwarzenegger’s power is waning was evident last month, however, in the decision of state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg to kill the governor’s reap-pointment of Rachelle Chong to a six-year term on the California Pub-lic Utilities Commission without a confirmation hearing.

Steinberg cited Chong’s record as the problem, but also indicated that he was likely to reject more of Schwarzenegger’s appointees whose terms would last well into the next governor’s tenure.

“There have been pro tems who have made the decision to simply not confirm any long-term nomi-nee in the last year of an adminis-tration,” Steinberg said. He said he would consider other appointees on “a case-by-case basis.”

The politics are straightforward. The power to give a governor any-thing he might want is a bargaining chip for lawmakers. But these chits may hold more value with a gover-nor who will have up to eight years to serve. Schwarzenegger, by con-

trast, has fewer chances to punish lawmakers who defy him and fewer issues he can use as leverage to ne-gotiate.

With a deal on the state’s water system completed with lawmakers in November, the only main issue around which he can still negoti-

ate is the ongoing state budget crisis. Lawmakers cannot wait for another governor to resolve the problem. Schwarzenegger may try during those talks to obtain changes to the state’s costly pension system, which he has been seeking for several years, as a last major accomplishment.

Schwarzenegger will lay out his agenda for the year during his State of the State address Wednesday.

The governor’s initial strategy for the budget appears to be an attempt to pressure the federal government for more funding that he says Cali-fornia needs to comply with federal laws. Schwarzenegger is expected in his budget proposal, due to come out on Friday, to demand that the state get back more of the taxes it sends to Washington, and to threaten large new cuts to social services, mass transit and other programs if U.S. of-ficials do not provide extra money

Other proof that his administra-tion is on a downward trajectory comes from his own high-ranking

aides, who have been streaming out the door.

In 2009, Schwarzenegger lost his legislative affairs secretary, the directors of the Departments of Finance, Transportation, General Services, Employment Develop-ment, Forestry and Fire Protec-tion, and the head of the California National Guard. Another cluster of top advisors departed at the end of 2008.

Most of those positions have been filled internally with lower-level managers, given the near im-possibility of attracting outside tal-ent to jobs they would be probably lose when the next governor takes the helm. (Schwarzenegger had trouble finding a finance director willing to replace the outgoing Mike Genest in a tough budget year, eventually pressing a deputy, Ana Matosantos, into service.)

For months, some departments have had “acting” directors or va-cancies at the top; the California Housing Finance Agency, for in-stance, has been without an execu-tive director for a year.

Other jobs have become re-volving doors. The governor has had three Cabinet secretaries in a year. He brought back Fred Aguiar, a trusted aide from the beginning of his administration, as secretary of the State and Consumer Ser-vices Agency after the agency’s previous leader resigned under fire in March. In early November, he moved Aguiar into the governor’s office, leaving the consumer agen-cy’s Cabinet-level post empty.

Some politicians find new free-dom in being a lame duck, feeling unconstrained in their words and actions without an election on the horizon. Schwarzenegger for a time held his tendency for politically in-correct comments in check. But he recently publicly scolded his wife for driving without a hands-free device, sent a legislator an obscene coded message in a veto letter and wielded a knife in a video while endorsing cuts in social services and education in the budget.

Lame duckContinued from page 1

tackle the deficit in its next bud-get, in February.

Lawmakers also will have to mull an increase in the nation’s borrowing limit. Just before leav-ing town on Christmas Eve, the Senate joined the House in ap-proving a short-term increase in the U.S. debt limit. But the $290 billion increase only bought the government borrowing power into February, meaning lawmak-ers must kick off an election year with a debate about the coun-try’s debt. The U.S. debt ceiling now stands at $12.4 trillion.

House and Senate lawmakers will converge on the Capitol for a pro-forma session on Tuesday, but won’t get back to work in earnest until mid-month. The House will be back in session on Jan. 12 and the Senate will return for votes on Jan. 20.

With unemployment at 10 percent and with prospects for significant job growth dim, law-makers are also poised to take up job-creation legislation.

The House cleared its $174 billion job-creation bill in De-cember and now it’s the Sen-ate’s turn to act. But Republi-cans have roundly criticized the measure and have compared it to the $787 billion economic stimulus bill signed by Obama last year. Republicans charge that the stimulus has been ineffective at creating jobs, but the White House says 3.5 million jobs are on track to be created by the end of the year.

Bank reform is also high on the congressional agenda. The House has passed its bill but the Senate hasn’t. At issue are rules that would prevent a reprise of the market meltdown that shook the world in 2008. But action is going to be slow out of the gate: the Senate Banking Committee is just beginning to debate the

legislation, and analysts think a final vote by the Senate may not come until spring.

November’s congressional elec-tions will hang over everything lawmakers do this year, and since a new president’s party usually loses seats, Democrats will need to be on the lookout for Repub-lican attempts to unseat them. All of the House’s 435 members are up for reelection, and there will be 36 Senate contests. Republi-cans would need 40 House seats to capture that chamber, and 10 seats to wrest Senate control from Democrats.

EconomyContinued from page 1

REDEFINED

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... being a lame duck does not mean that you have to sit back and let the situ-ation overwhelm

you. — Bill Whalen

Speechwriter

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www.mustangdaily.net

Wire Editor: Jennifer TitcombTuesday, January 5, 2010 3Mustang Daily

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Secret Service says third uninvited person attended state dinnerKathleen Hennesseytribune Washington bureau

WASHINGTON — The list of uninvited guests at a White House state dinner got longer Monday when the Secret Service acknowl-edged that a third person had at-tended the gala for the Indian prime minister last November without an invitation.

The Secret Service discovered that a third person had made it into the White House dinner as it was in-vestigating how Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the now-famous Virginia so-cialites, made it past security to at-tend the same event.

The third interloper, who was not publicly named by the Secret Service, traveled from a local hotel with members of the Indian delega-tion, the agency said in a statement that was released after the incident was reported on a Web site.

The person bypassed one level of White House security, the statement said. Unlike other members of the Indian group, the person was not cleared through the Secret Service system that runs background checks on White House visitors.

But the person was subject to other screening measures on the night of the event.

“This individual went through all required security measures along with the rest of the official delega-tion at the hotel,” the agency said. “At present, there is nothing to indicate that this individual went through the receiving line or had contact with the president or first lady.”

No charges have been filed in

either dinner-crashing incident, said Ben Friedman, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.

The revelation is the latest em-barrassment for the agency charged with guarding the president. The Secret Service has been the subject of criticism and mockery since it learned of the Salahis’ exploits by reading Michaele Salahi’s Facebook post.

The third interloper was detected in a subsequent Secret Service review of security procedures, according to Ronald Kessler, a journalist who first reported the incident Monday

on the site Newsmax.com. Kessler said agents watched videotape of the event and matched images to names on the guest list. One man could not be matched to the list, he wrote.

“Procedural changes have already been implemented to address for-eign delegations under the respon-sibility of Department of State who are entering facilities secured by the Secret Service,” the Secret Service statement said.

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan last month told the House Homeland Security Committee

mcclatchy-tribune

President Barack Obama greets Michaele and Tareq Salahi during a re-ceiving line in the Blue Room of the White House before the State Din-ner with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, on November 24. The Salahis and another unnamed person were at the dinner without an invitation but made it through security checkpoints.

see Uninvited, page 5

NASA’s Kepler probe finds five strange new planetsMike Swiftsan jose Mercury neWs

SAN JOSE, Calif. — In what astronomers called an exciting step toward detecting Earth-like planets, a spacecraft operated by NASA’s Ames Research Center has found five strange new plan-ets, beginning to reveal how the structure of our solar system fits into the rest of the universe.

The five planets announced Monday by scientists working on the Kepler probe are an exotic bunch, one with a density as light as styrofoam. The large planets orbit so close to their stars that they may glow with the heat of a blast furnace, as hot as the melting point of iron.

“It’s certainly no place to look for life,” said Bill Borucki, the principal investigator with the Kepler mission at Ames. “That will be coming later.”

Launched in March, the 2,300-pound spacecraft detects the tran-sit of a planet across the star’s face. These are the first new planets found by the probe.

For a smaller Earth-like planet orbiting at a great enough dis-tance from its star to support life, Kepler will need about three years of planet transit data — meaning that NASA’s first announcement of finding “other Earths” prob-ably won’t happen before 2012.

While astronomers first de-tected a planet orbiting another star in 1995, Kepler has unique abilities that may revolutionize how astronomers understand the formation and character of plan-ets. Because of its position in space and its ability to monitor more than 150,000 stars continuously

with great precision, Kepler is the first instrument able to detect the full range of planets — from gas giants like Jupiter to rocky ter-restrial planets like the Earth and Mars, and everything in between.

“We’re starting to fill in the picture of the different types of planets in ways that we couldn’t before,” said Jon Jenkins of the SETI Institute, co-investigator for data analysis for the $591 million Kepler mission.

Scientists had thought there were two classes of planets — terrestrial and gas giants. The new Kepler data, Jenkins said, hints that intermediate sized planets such as “Neptune and Uranus form in a different fashion than Jupiters and Saturns. There are finer distinc-tions in how these planets form.”

Kepler also had reassuring news for those who worry about the future of the source of all life on Earth — the sun. It turns out that a majority of the roughly 43,000 sun-like, “G-class” stars that Kepler observed are as stable or more stable than the sun.

That is good news for scientists who hope to find life elsewhere in the galaxy, because it indicates that there are many stars that might allow a benign environ-ment over the long term for the evolution of complex life forms.

But it also seems to indicate, astronomers said, that our sun is more likely to remain stable into the future.

“I’m going to sleep better to-night knowing we’re in a good, safe place,” said Caty Pilachowski, an astronomer at Indiana Univer-sity who reviewed Kepler’s data.

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Tuesday, January 5, 20104 Mustang Daily

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CIA bomber may have been Jordanian double-agentGreg Millertribune Washington bureau

WASHINGTON — The sui-cide bomber who killed eight people at a CIA compound in Afghanistan last week was a Jorda-nian who had been recruited by that nation’s intelligence service to help U.S. spy agencies penetrate al-Qaeda, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official.

The bombing killed seven CIA employees who were apparently lured to a meeting with the sup-posed informant by the prospect of important new intelligence on al-Qaeda’s inner circle. The attack also killed a Jordanian intelligence officer believed to have been re-sponsible for serving as the main point of contact with the infor-mant accused of carrying out the attack.

The disclosure that the most deadly incident in recent CIA his-

tory may have been the work of a double-agent suggests a new level of sophistication in al-Qaeda’s ef-forts to retaliate against the agency responsible for an intense cam-paign of Predator strikes on the terrorist network in Pakistan over the past two years.

The revelations also reveal the inherent risks in the CIA’s deep reliance on Jordan and other for-eign partners in sensitive counter-terrorism operations.

“That’s how you do these op-erations — you find people who can conceivably penetrate terror-ist organizations, try to turn them and run them” against terrorist targets, said the former U.S. in-telligence official, who is familiar with aspects of last week’s attack but spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Obviously, this one turned out tragically.”

Another former senior U.S. intelligence official who served

in the region said that high-level CIA operatives from Kabul had been summoned to the remote base near Khost for what they were led to believe would be an important meeting with a well-placed informant.

At least two of those CIA of-ficers from Kabul were wounded, the former agency official said. The former official said that the fact that the informant was able to enter the base with a bomb strapped to his body suggests that he had earned the trust of his CIA and Jordanian handlers.

“What this tells you is that al-Qaeda is now capable of running a fairly sophisticated double-agent operation,” the former CIA of-ficial said. “This guy totally had them believing, which means he had (previously) given them veri-fiable information, and everything

see Bomber, page 5

Year begins with 4 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan

KABUL — U.S. forces in Af-ghanistan suffered their first com-bat deaths of the new year, the military report Monday, with four troops killed a day earlier in the country’s violent south.

The battlefield losses came as Afghan President Hamid Karzai faced a fresh political confronta-tion, ordering parliament to put off its winter recess and vote on a new Cabinet lineup as soon as this weekend. On Saturday, lawmakers defied the president by rejecting two-thirds of his Cabinet picks.

Western officials are worried about the weakness of the Karzai government as the Obama ad-ministration embarks on a troop buildup that will nearly double the American military presence in Afghanistan. The Afghan leader is also under pressure to form a government before a major con-ference of international donors in London beginning Jan. 28.

As the first of 30,000 new U.S. troops begin flowing into the country, adding to some 68,000 already deployed here, Western commanders have warned that a commensurate increase in casual-ties is likely. That is in part because the additional American forces will push into parts of the country that were previously under the sway of the Taliban and other insurgents.

In 2010’s first reported battle-field deaths, military officials said four American troops had been killed in a roadside bomb in the south. A British soldier was also killed in a separate explosion.

Roadside bombs are the No. 1 killer of Western forces in Afghan-istan, and have become the signa-ture weapon of the Taliban and other insurgents. Multiple fatali-ties in a single incident, such as the strike that killed the four Ameri-cans, have become commonplace, because members of the Taliban are using larger and more power-ful improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, capable of destroying ar-mored vehicles and killing most or all of those inside.

The military did not reveal the location of the latest U.S. deaths, but most Americans in the south are based in Helmand and Kanda-har provinces, where the Taliban movement is the strongest. Those provinces are also a center of Af-ghanistan’s drug trade, which has close links to the insurgency.

Most of the arriving reinforce-ments are to be deployed in the south, where thousands of U.S. Marines have been trying to se-cure a key swath of the Helmand River valley. Other U.S. troops are working to quell a rising in-surgent presence around the city of Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual center.

Fighting also has flared recently in Afghanistan’s north, where the insurgency has strengthened in recent months. Afghanistan’s De-fense Ministry said at least 10 Tali-ban fighters were killed in a clash Sunday with Afghan troops.

The Western war effort has been complicated by months of political paralysis, and the dead-lock may deepen in coming days. While parliament’s weekend rejec-tion of 17 of Karzai’s 24 Cabinet choices was seen in some quarters as a welcome display of indepen-dence on lawmakers’ part, it has also left the government barely functioning.

Setting the stage for a poten-tial showdown, senior aides to Karzai suggested that the president may put forth some of the same Cabinet nominees when the is-sue comes up for a second vote. Among those rejected was Ismail Khan, a powerful warlord who is the incumbent minister of energy.

The support of a number of onetime militia leaders such as Khan helped Karzai win a second term in office, though the August election was clouded by massive fraud. While Karzai was eventually declared the winner, international auditors stripped him of nearly a million votes, depriving him of the clear mandate he had sought.

If Karzai is able to strong-arm his Cabinet choices through par-liament, it may add to widespread public disillusionment over cor-ruption and inefficiency in the government. But a new political defeat for the president could open the door to prolonged infighting that could render his government an even more unstable partner for the West.

Western diplomats have made it clear to Karzai they expect him to carry out sweeping reforms, but that will be difficult if the Afghan leader is preoccupied with fight-ing off challenges from political rivals.

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Tuesday, January 5, 2010 5Mustang Daily

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Word on the Street

“How was your winter break?”

compiled and photographed by jennifer titcomb

“It was quiet and fun. I saw a concert and went snowboard-ing.”

-Robert Michael, biological sci-ences freshman

“My winter break was fabu-lous. I went to Monterey and it was fun.”

-Ralph Lee, political science ju-nior

“It was OK. I went on vacation to Palm Springs with my fam-ily.”

-Robin Bayless, economics freshman

“It was good I travelled to Washington but there was no snow to see.”

-Phebe Yip, civil engineering senior

“It was really relaxing. I went to St. Louis, Missouri with friends; it was fun.”

-Rabecca Gleason, child devel-opment freshman

“It was really fun. I saw friends and family and got to snow-board.”

-Phillip Blacklock, mechanical engineering sophomore

WHAT’S YOUR

RANTYOU WRITE IN.mustangdai lywire@gmai l .comWE INVESTIGATE.

AMRITSAR, India, and IS-LAMABAD, Pakistan (MCT) — Five Americans detained in Pakistan after allegedly trying to link up with militant groups over the Internet denied in court Monday that they had any intention of carrying out terrorist attacks, their defense attor-ney said.

The five, all young Muslim men from the Washington, D.C., area, were arrested in early December in Sargodha, a city in eastern Pakistan.

The suspects, who range in age from 19 to 25, denied they had ties to al-Qaida or other militant groups during a court appearance in Sar-godha, said their attorney, Ameer Abdullah Rokri.

• • •BEIJING (MCT) — Web us-

ers reported an outage of China’s strict Internet controls, known as the Great Firewall, for several hours Monday morning, allowing them brief access to banned Web sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Cautious excitement spread on some social-networking platforms as hope flared that Internet freedoms suddenly were being expanded after months of intensifying scrutiny.

“It’s finally unblocked, reasons unknown,” wrote a blogger named EFanZh. “I hope nothing gets blocked anymore. I can’t take it any longer.”

InternationalLAS VEGAS (MCT) — At

least two people have died fol-lowing a shooting Monday morn-ing inside a federal courthouse in downtown Las Vegas, authorities said. The suspected gunman was among the dead.

The gunman opened fire on a deputy U.S. marshal and a court security officer at the Lloyd D. George Federal District Court-house, just south of the aging ca-sinos on Fremont Street. The As-sociated Press reported that one of the wounded officers had died in the 8 a.m. PST shooting.

Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Roxanna Irwin said there was only one gunman, whose name had not been released. He died soon after the shooting.

• • •WASHINGTON (MCT) —

Secretary of State Hillary Rod-ham Clinton declared Monday that Yemen is a threat to global security but warned that the Obama administration will con-tinue accelerating U.S. aid only if the Yemeni government meets U.S. demands to take steps to-ward stability.

Clinton signaled a growing administration focus on the be-leaguered Arabian state, saying Yemen has become a launching pad for terrorist attacks on dis-tant corners of the world.

NationalSAN LUIS OBISPO (MCT)

— A former Cal Poly farm me-chanic has filed a lawsuit against the university claiming racial discrimi-nation, including allegations that colleagues spat on his truck and cursed his name in writing.

Carlos Ramirez filed the suit against the university and former supervisor Gary Ketcham. The fil-ing represents only one side of the case.

Ramirez was the only Hispanic working among a group of white employees in the university’s farm shop, where agricultural equipment ,such as tractors, is stored and re-paired by staff and students, said his lawyer, David Hagan.

Ramirez worked at Cal Poly from March 2005 until November 2007 and had positive performance reviews, Hagan said.

• • •PLEASANTON (MCT) —

They brought their guns to down-town Livermore — to have a cup of coffee and demonstrate their right to literally bear arms.

A group of more than a dozen people met at a downtown cafe Saturday afternoon, some of them had unloaded semi-automatic pis-tols holstered to their belts with their ammunition clips readily available. The demonstration was put on by members of the “open carry” movement.

State

Briefs

human error was to blame for the Salahi mishap. Asked if the Salahis were the only party crashers at the dinner, Sullivan said that he could

comment in detail only in a closed hearing.

“But I believe that I can satisfy you in explaining that there were no other people there that night that should not (have been there),” he said.

Kessler said the review of video-

tapes occurred after Sullivan’s testi-mony.

A spokesman for the House Homeland Security Committee said the committee had been in contact with the Secret Service on Monday and was expecting more informa-tion.

Uninvitedcontinued from page 3

had checked out.”Still, former officials said the

suicide bombing represented a seri-ous and so far unexplained breach of security at the heavily guarded base.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the circumstances of the attack or the agency’s relation-ship with Jordan’s intelligence ser-vice. Sources who provided infor-mation about the attack cautioned that the broad details of the plot were only beginning to be under-stood, and that many details re-mained unclear.

The bomber was identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year-old doctor from Zarza, Jordan, the same hometown as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was al-Qaeda’s top operative in Iraq before he was killed in 2006. Al-Balawi’s identity was first reported by Al-Jazeera.

Balawi, according to the Arab news agency, was arrested by Jor-dan’s intelligence service more than a year ago. The service, known as General Intelligence Department, or GID, believed it had succeeded in turning al-Balawi from an al-Qaeda sympathizer into an asset who could be used to penetrate the terrorist network in Afghanistan.

Al-Balawi’s assignment was to

help track down al-Qaeda No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, also a doctor, according to the Al-Jazeera report, which said that the bomber had fooled his Jordanian and CIA con-tacts for more than a year.

Evan Kohlmann, a counterter-rorism expert, said that al-Balawi was also a “notorious al-Qaida cy-beractivist” known for extremist postings on sites tied to the terror-ist network. Kohlmann said in an e-mail that al-Balawi’s online moniker was “Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani,” and that “he had announced he was leaving to go join the fight in Af-ghanistan, and was trying to inspire others to follow in his footsteps.”

The Jordanian intelligence offi-cer killed in the attack was identi-fied as Sharif Ali bin Zeid. Jordan’s King Abdullah II was present when Zeid’s casket arrived in the country, according to a report by Jordan’s news service, which said only that Ali “fell as he performed his hu-manitarian duty with the Jordanian contingent” in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials said that the bomb-ing is unlikely to have an impact on the CIA’s work with its Jordanian counterpart. The agency’s relation-ship with the GID is “probably the most solid one we have” in the Arab world, said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The relationship dates back to the 1950s, officials said, and ex-

panded in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as the CIA worked closely with Jordan. Human rights groups have accused Jordan of in-volvement in CIA interrogation and rendition operations.

The CIA also collaborated ex-tensively with Jordan, as well as other Arab allies, on a program launched after the Sept. 11 strikes to identify recruits in the Muslim world who could be used to gather intelligence on al-Qaeda. One for-mer high-ranking U.S. intelligence official said the effort was dubbed the “baby terrorist program,” be-cause its aim was to identify indi-viduals who could pass as Islamic militants and be turned against ter-rorism targets.

“The theory behind it was that right after the attacks we were looking to recruit sources who could penetrate terrorist organiza-tions,” the former official said. “We worked with friendly services, and certainly the Jordanians.”

The disclosure of Jordan’s ties to the attack came as CIA Director Leon E. Panetta and other agency officials traveled to Dover Air Force Base for the arrival of the bodies of the seven slain agency officers, according to George Little, a CIA spokesman.

Among those killed were four CIA officers and three contractors hired to provide security.

(Sebastian Rotella in Washing-ton contributed to this report.)

Bombercontinued from page 4

Arts

tuesday, january 5, 2010 arts & entertainment editor: cassandra keyse

Valentine’s Day: An Early Warning

You have 50 days until Valentine’s Day. Why am I giving you so much notice? Well, you might need it. If you believe the media, you probably should have started planning months ago.

Valentine’s Day used to be about sending cards. It’s only in the past 50 years or so that the range of gifts expanded to flowers, chocolate and jewelry. These are more expensive, which is all the better for the florists, chocolatiers and jewelers, but bad news for you. You can expect to drop $125 at the very cheapest on this trifecta, which doesn’t even include dinner.

This is a lot of money, especially for students, but advertisements make certain promises that might tempt us to buy. Buying something as ex-pensive as jewelry must mean that it is true love, and of course, in ev-ery commercial chocolate is shown practically causing orgasms. Flowers aren’t really portrayed as having any sort of special powers, but they are such a staple (who doesn’t get 12 roses?) that they barely need any ads at all.

What it comes down to is that so-ciety (i.e. companies that sell Valen-tine’s gifts) want you to forget about all the love and feelings and stuff and just buy your girlfriend what every-one else is buying.

And yes, I said girlfriend, because I have never seen an add that prom-ises guys any sort of Valentine’s Day gift, except sex as a direct result of the other gifts he has bought.

Sexism and prostitution aside, there is no way to succeed in this kind of system. Sure, you bought flowers, chocolate and jewelry, but that’s just the basics. To truly create a fairy-tale Valentine’s Day, you will need to at least throw down $500 an hour for a horse-drawn carriage, to say nothing about the trained doves and string quartet. Even a fairly ba-sic romantic dinner is not only fairly pricey, but can easily fall through if you don’t make reservations soon. So why do we even try?

Truth is, advertizing doesn’t only work on the guy who has to buy all this stuff. Whether they like it or not, everyone’s expectations have been raised by these ridiculous ads. I don’t care who you are, if you’re expect-ing dinner at a fancy restaurant and a diamond necklace, and you get Pita Pit and a ring pop, you’re going to be a bit disappointed.

The secret to having as little of

that disappointment as possible is, of course, communication. Try to figure out what each person in the relationship expects from the day. It would be classy to not do this the day before. There are many different ways you can celebrate Valentine’s Day and you shouldn’t feel pressured to celebrate in a way neither of you really wants.

If your relationship is relatively young, Valentine’s could be fraught with even more trouble. If you are still infatuated with each other, it won’t be very healthy to listen to the day’s message of true love, marriage proposals and happily ever after. You will probably still want to celebrate it, but make sure that you’re having fun, and not in a restaurant surrounded by couples who have been together for years. It’s probably too soon to be thinking that far down the road, es-pecially when you should be focus-ing on each other and not on what society thinks you should be feeling.

And if you find yourself on Valen-tine’s Day with nobody to celebrate with, it is of course a perfect time to celebrate “Singles Awareness Day” with friends. Just try to do things that will place you far away from the happy couples, as that defeats the purpose of celebrating your single-ness and your right to celebrate even if you aren’t seeing anyone. Watching a movie while eating ice cream is a traditional favorite, but don’t pass up a fun (not romantic) dinner or some-thing more wild (sex toy party?). There are endless possibilities.

Another benefit of Valentine’s Day is that if you do feel lonely, it’s likely that others feel the same way. While it would be unlikely to start a relationship with someone while under that sort of pressure, hooking up with someone might be just the thing to remind you of the fun of single life. Just be sure that you don’t expect anything more than fun from it.

In short, whatever your situation this Valentine’s Day, don’t let your day be dictated by our consumerist culture. For hundreds of years, it was a holiday about love, and that should be your focus, not whatever you are supposed to buy to prove that you have love. As long as the day is spe-cial, who cares what you buy or get?

Anthony Rust is a biology junior and Mustang Daily sex columnist. Quibbles or queries? E-mail him at arust@calpoly.edu.

High school senior gains national recognition for music videoNicole Brodeurthe seattle times

SEATTLE — So Ashton Kutch-er and Ben Stiller were tweeting the other day. You know. Down in Hollywood.

Ashton says to Ben: “Wish You-Tube existed when I was in high school.”

And Ben says, “We are all going to be working for Javier Caceres in five years.”

Javier Caceres. You know. The filmmaker.

If you haven’t heard of him, you will. He’s the senior at Shore-wood High School in Shoreline, Wash., who helped conceive, cho-reograph and shoot “Shorewood Lip Dub”— a music video of Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True” that was shot forward but is shown backward.

The 6 minute, 37 second, how’d-they-do-it video went up on YouTube Dec. 17. On. Dec. 22, it was featured on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC. On Dec. 23, it was the focus of a story in the Los Angeles Times.

And now Ashton and Ben are all atwitter, along with Nickel-odeon powerhouse producer Dan Schneider, who The New York Times called “the Norman Lear of children’s television.”

“It’s amazing, unbelievable,” Caceres said the other day. “I just never thought it was going to be this huge. I’ve just been in a daze, taking it all in.”

Even better for Caceres would be if the video was seen by Mi-chel Gondry, the French director behind “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and Caceres’ idol.

“If he ever watched the video, I would lose my mind,” said Caceres, 18. “He’s the epitome of creativ-ity.”

The Shorewood lip-dub was a response to one made last month by rival Shorecrest High School to OutKast’s “Hey Ya!”

Shorecrest’s video-production class produced a continuous, one-take video involving hundreds of students dancing and singing

through the halls. There’s a banana in a wheelchair, the grim reap-er and a topless Scot, and people lending sugar and shakin’ it like a Polaroid picture. (You know what to do.)

The whole thing was captured by student cameraman Kollin O’Dannel.

Shorewood saw it, and the chal-lenge was on.

There was talk of using the Beat-les’ cover of “Twist and Shout,” but Caceres thought it was too slow.

So he and video production

see Caceres, page 8

mcclatchy-tribune

Javier Caceres has received national attention for his music video of Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True,” which was shot forward, but is shown backward.

Arts

Arts editor: Cassandra Keyse

www.mustangdaily.net

Tuesday, January 5, 2010 7Mustang Daily

Artsmustangdailyarts@gmail.com

“The drive by”

Professor decodes Starbucks’ secrets to success in new bookLuciana Chavezmcclatchy newspapers

Temple University professor Bryant Si-mon believes he knows the Starbucks se-cret.

And it’s not the caramel macchiato or the 86,999 other drinks the international coffee purveyors sell us.

It’s the lifestyle we buy with that $3 cup of joe.

Simon, 48, wanted to show how Ameri-cans communicate with their purchases.

So, for his book “Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Star-bucks,” he visited 435 Starbucks in the U.S. and 10 other countries, analyzing everything from the flooring to the signage and every-one from the customers to CEO Howard Schultz.

“I listened to Alanis Morissette more than anyone should have to,” Simon says.

In the book, the UNC-Chapel Hill graduate explains how Starbucks became a Wall Street favorite by making its customers feel environmentally aware, upwardly mo-bile, connected and cool by welcoming us, by name, into their clean, urban-chic stores, pumping hip music, and selling us (some) fair-trade coffee in cups made of 60 percent recycled materials.

We got all that in one cup of coffee? At least the illusion of it, Simon says.

Simon spent five years researching, think-ing and writing about the global business phenomenon that is Starbucks, a company that serves 50 million customers per week.

Then he “avoided it like the plague” until his book was published in October.

While he worked, Simon chatted up people at Starbucks and organized focus groups. He talked to interior design experts and monitored message boards on Web sites such as www.ihatestarbucks.com and www.urbandictionary.com.

He dragged his wife to Guadalajara, Mexico, to meet a Starbucks fan he’d met online.

“Everyone had something to say,” he says. “It became kind of tedious, but I’d end up in the bathroom scribbling down notes on napkins.”

Reading the storeSimon found clues to Starbucks’ success

all over each shop he visited.During a recent stop at Starbucks on

Peace Street in Raleigh, N.C., Simon point-ed out two big, royal purple chairs posi-tioned in one corner. The comfy chairs of-fered a chance for respite; the royal purple color and velvety fabric oozed opulence and affluence.

At the store at the corner of Maynard and Chapel Hill Road in Cary, N.C., Simon explained how the napkins, featuring a mes-sage about recycling, give customers a stake in the do-good Starbucks image.

A sign asserted Starbucks as a coffee ex-pert, featuring a photo of coffee cups on a burlap coffee sack and asking, “Can you spot the coffee made with the top 3 percent of the world’s best coffee beans?”

Another sign advertised a caramel bru-lee latte, adorned like a holiday dessert. The message? You deserve this gift.

They work. Customers told Simon they went to Starbucks to treat themselves.

One of Simon’s former students from the University of Georgia told him she bought Starbucks’ Ethos water because the company donated some of the money to clean water projects overseas.

Others said they went because the rela-tively expensive drinks were affordable ways to have a taste of a better life.

Getting all of that for $3 or $4 is a steal. It’s also the American way, Simon says.

“It’s us,” he says. “We want these things and we want them as easily as possible.”

ReactionSimon had to rewrite

the book to explain how Starbucks got off track in 2007, long before the current recession.

“Starbucks is selling status, which is a different model than say Wal-Mart, which is about selling more,” he says. “When we saw Starbucks pursue the selling-more model, it cut into the status-mak-ing that had been so suc-cessful. Wal-Mart is about value. Starbucks has never

been about that.”Writing about the cof-

fee titan left Simon want-ing. He tired of seeing the same piece of art-work in every store.

He told his for-mer Georgia student that she was paying an extra 35 cents for the privilege of buying Ethos water. Starbucks gives 5 cents from each bottle to water projects. Ethos water costs about $1.80. Other bottled wa-ter of that size are in the $1.40 range.

“I pointed out that they charged her extra to help people,” Simon says. “She was like, ‘Oh man.’ I felt bad because she was so earnest about it. She read the sign and thought, ‘I’m doing something to help.’”

He noted how at one Star-bucks he recently had to ask for a ceramic cup in order to avoid a paper cup. Then, that same day

an

mcclatchy-tribune

Bryant Simon visited 435 Starbucks locations in 11 different

countries to gather infor-mation for his

book, published in October.

see Starbucks, page 8

Arts

www.mustangdaily.net

Tuesday, January 5, 20108 Mustang Daily

Arts

teacher Martin Ballew, 36, set-tled on the poppy Hall and Oates song, which was featured in the recent film “(500) Days of Sum-mer.”

They were inspired by director Spike Jonze’s video for “Drop,” by The Pharsyde — also shot forward but played backward.

But doing that meant Caceres had to listen to the song hundreds of times, backward, to figure out the mouth movements for stu-dents to lip-sync. Played forward, it looks like they’re singing the lyrics perfectly.

Caceres can speak the gibber-ish on demand.

Still, he shies from the credit and couldn’t say enough about Ballew, or the others in his class who managed five different teams of students.

They shot during fifth period on Dec. 16, wading through some 600 students from 19 classes. They did five run-throughs in 100 min-utes.

Ballew not only shepherded the whole project along, he fol-lowed Caceres through the school during the shoot, wearing a back-pack/boombox that was blasting the song. (He makes a cameo in a knitted hat; Caceres does, too, wearing a crown of balloons).

And get this: Not one student did anything untoward or ob-scene.

“No one wanted to be the per-son who ruined it for everyone,” said Ballew.

If anything, it made Shorewood

a tighter community.“There are teachers who have

been here for more than 20 years, who said they had never seen the school so excited,” Ballew said. “It really brought everyone together.”

And while it may have put a little heat on the Shorewood- Shorecrest rivalry, well, it will nev-er get that hot.

Ballew has been friends with Shorecrest video production teacher Trent Mitchell since middle school, when they started making videos together. They were in the same program at Central Wash-ington University and now team-teach a video-production class for students at both high schools.

“It’s a thrill that we are where we are now,” Ballew said. “And we all have tremendous respect for each other.”

So do others.MSNBC’s Maddow, who aired

both videos, called Shorecrest’s “’Glee’ meets Andre 3000 meets Robert Altman.”

And she gave Caceres a shout-out for figuring out the phonetics and teaching his classmates how to sing them: “Dude, if that is not the first item on every college appli-cation you ever fill out,” Maddow said, “You are totally blowing it.”

Caceres still can’t believe it. Six years ago, he was new to this country, having moved here with his parents and brother from Peru.

Now, he’s a Running Start stu-dent, taking classes at Shoreline Community College, and dream-ing of being a director.

And when the video debuted in the packed, gym, Caceres got a standing ovation.

“I’ve run out of adjectives,” he

Cacerescontinued from page 6

employee at the Morning Times, an independent coffeehouse in downtown Raleigh, asked him the same question.

“That one gesture is more im-portant than boasts (of environ-mental friendliness),” Simon says.

Starbucks respondsSimon ran afoul of the com-

pany before he finished the book. He says Starbucks initially agreed to talk to him if it could have fi-nal say over what he wrote. Simon said no. He said Starbucks did not respond to his weekly e-mails for two years.

He traveled to Seattle once to do interviews scheduled through Starbucks but several were can-celed. Another Starbucks employee wrote Simon saying the company felt he had “a hidden agenda.”

A spokesman says Starbucks agrees with Simon that “coffee-houses play an important role in communities.”

“In fact, Starbucks was founded nearly 40 years ago with that same vision, and we’ve been commit-ted to facilitating public dialogue at the local and global level ever since,” the spokesman wrote in an e-mailed response. “We believe that every community is unique, and we’re creating places — both in our stores and online — where diverse groups can connect.”

Simon feels the company still speaks through its signs, ads, etc.

“That speech was carefully con-sidered with its audience in mind,” Simon says. “They’re not reticent in their own self-promotion, so in the end I don’t feel the book lacks for their response.”

AftermathDespite backlash from some

consumers and more competition

from McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, Simons says Starbucks is not about to drop off the face of the earth.

One of its cultural and business triumphs was creating a legion of coffee drinkers.

“I think it will always serve an emotional need for predictability,” Simon says. “You always know what you’re going to get at Star-bucks.”

Simon will next jump into the lion’s mouth during a trip to Se-attle on Jan. 14. He’ll be signing his book at the Elliott Bay Book Company, a mere 1.3 miles from Starbucks corporate headquarters.

(Simon will also sign books and talk to readers at the Bull’s Head Bookstore on the UNC campus Feb. 4.)

“I don’t know what the reac-tion will be (in Seattle),” he says. “Will I get Starbucks defenders? It would be interesting. I’d encour-age and welcome the debate.”

Starbuckscontinued from page 7

2010 brings new trends around the food industryJoan Obramcclatchy newspapers

With the end of the year upon us, it’s time to try predicting next year’s hottest food trends.

Everyone from the National Restaurant Association to food bloggers get into this game. Here’s a look at five of these trends.

More information, please: As consumers hunger to know more about their food, manufacturers and retailers will provide it.

“It’s everything from looking for mercury-safe seafood to want-ing to know that humane treatment was given to farm animals,” states The Food Channel, a Web site that tracks food trends. “It’s about no hormones in meats, and organi-cally grown fruits and vegetables. It’s about Fair Trade chocolate and spices.”

Also, there’s the California law

that requires chain restaurants with at least 20 locations to provide nu-tritional information. It’s part of a trend dubbed “maximum dis-closure” by New York advertising agency JWT.

During 2010, such restaurants will gear up for the next phase of the law: They must print calories on menus or indoor menu boards as of January 1, 2011.

More local food: The top two restaurant menu trends are “lo-cally grown produce” and “locally sourced meats and seafood,” accord-ing to a national Restaurant Asso-ciation survey of more than 1,800 chefs.

More local wine and beer: As restaurants add local food to their menus, it makes sense for them to add local drinks. This is the fifth top trend in the National Restaurant Association’s survey.

Here’s good news for your waist-

line: bite-sized desserts, the No. 4 trend for restaurant menus in the National Restaurant Association’s survey.

As for types of desserts that will be popular, epicurious.com’s blog (called the epilog), has high praise for the sandwich cookies known as whoopie pies.

Evidence of this trend is in the upcoming book “Whoopie Pies: Dozens of Mix ‘em, Match ‘em, Eat ‘em Up Recipes!,” by Sarah Billing-sley and Amy Treadwell (Chronicle Books, $16.95) and the carrot-cake whoopie pies from Recchiuti, the San Francisco chocolatier.

Black garlic: These black, savory-sweet garlic cloves contain twice the antioxidants as regular garlic — and don’t cause bad breath, JWT says. You’ll find them at upscale restau-rants and gourmet food shops, but at $28 a pound, black garlic isn’t cheap.

Op

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opinion/EditorialTuesday, January 5, 2010

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War is no excuse to surrender right to privacy

It seems the Christmas “under-wear bomber” has shined the spot-light back on the War on Terror, and I’ve been disappointed to say the least about the rhetoric I’ve been hearing from both parties on the subject. The differences in their strategies for the war seem to have been withering for a while, and now we’re at a point where it’s diffi-cult to

discern any real differences in their approach. Back on Oct. 27, 2007, Obama said the following: “I will promise you this: That if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”

However, time has shown that he has not lived up to this

promise and if any-thing, is actually ex-panding the War on Terror.

One thing that bothers me greatly about the war is peo-ple’s desire to give up their rights for “safety.” As Benjamin Frank-lin said, “Those who would give up essential

liberty to pur-chase a little temporary safety, de-

serve neither liberty nor safety.” With the under-wear bomber incident, I’ve heard many say that we need full-body imaging at air-ports to ensure

the safety of air travel.

I shud-der at the t h o u g h t of being vir tually

undressed every time

I want to fly somewhere; that’s quite a severe invasion of privacy. I’d argue that even if you prioritize safety over freedom, that it’s still not the best way to go about things.

Isaac Yeffet, former head of El Al Airlines (known as the world’s most secure airline), recently did an inter-view on Fox News in which he was asked if he supports body scans. His answer: “No, totally no.” El Al’s secu-rity has prevented any terrorist inci-dents for the past 30 years, and they provide an excellent level of security with minimal impacts to the passen-gers. They achieve this through many different measures, many of them requiring high levels of training for their staff rather than purchase ex-pensive equipment. All El Al passen-gers are interviewed individually be-fore boarding and their identities are checked against information from the FBI, Canadian Security Intel-ligence Service, Scotland Yard, Shin Bet and Interpol databases.

An interview requires very little of passengers, but it can be invalu-able when it comes to security. Also, considering the fact that the United States spent $75 billion on intelli-gence last year, you’d think we could successfully integrate that knowledge at airports so screeners would be able to spend more time on notable sus-pects and perhaps deny them access to flights.

I think it’s important to not get so caught in up reactionary policies. There was the shoe bomber and now we remove our shoes during airport screenings. Since the underwear bomber, there has been a push to, well, look beneath underwear (using body-imaging screening). Who ex-actly is winning this war?

Beyond security measures, at air-ports and in general, is the underly-ing problem of “terrorism.” It would be rather nice if there weren’t people coming to the United States to try and kill us in the first place. The War on Terror is a complicated war, and I don’t claim to be an expert, but I wonder what might have happened if Obama had made good on his promise to bring our troops home, and I mean all of them.

Osama bin Laden’s stated goal is to bog us down in an unwinnable war in the Middle East and bankrupt us; we sure seem to be falling into that trap.

One final thought: Exactly one week before Christmas, Obama ordered an airstrike in Yemen. Es-timates are that 120 people were killed, of whom roughly 30 were al-Qaeda members. A statement re-leased by al-Qaeda indicated the at-tempted underwear bombing was retaliation for the recent offensive in Yemen. We seem to be slaughtering al Qaeda members left and right and it’s not my understanding that there are a whole lot of them, so I have to wonder if the family members of the civilians we have killed become new al-Qaeda recruits. In this recent airstrike, roughly 90 civilians were killed. Perhaps the air strike made things worse for us, despite the fact that we killed roughly 30 of our en-emies. U.S. actions are having con-sequences that we are not paying attention to, and I fear many more lives will be lost before we come to our senses.

Aaron Berk is a computer engineer-ing junior and Mustang Daily political columnist.

barry maguire newsart

“Right now Cal Poly is recognized as an outstanding school in Cali-fornia, but is completely unknown in regards to the rest of the nation. If we do start to become more of a national draw, with it will come national recognition. Thus will give our graduates a much better chance of landing better jobs outside of California ... The problem is that this action serves with total disregard to the CSU’s fundamental root.”

—AnonymousResponse to “Cal Poly ups out-of-state

recruitment effort”

NOTE: The Mustang Daily fea-tures select comments that are written in response to articles posted online. Though not all the responses are print-ed, the Mustang Daily prints com-ments that are coherent and foster in-telligent discussion on a given subject.

los angeles times

Whenever we see a report on the declining violence in Iraq, we’re reminded of the old book ti-tle, “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.” Take, for instance, the report that the civilian death toll fell in November to the lowest level since the 2003 U.S. invasion: 88 fatalities. That was after Octo-ber bombings in Baghdad killed 155 people, and just ahead of De-cember’s two rounds of multiple car bombings in the capital that left at least 136 dead and hundreds wounded.

Don’t get us wrong. This is far from the height of the civil war in 2006-07, when thousands of civil-ians died each month and every day was a struggle for typical Iraqis to get their children to and from school, go to work, do their shop-ping and stay alive amid attacks by ethnic death squads and car bomb-ings. By that measure, even as doz-

ens of pilgrims were killed and more than 150 wounded by sec-tarian insurgents, the Shiite Mus-lim holiday of Ashura last month was relatively peaceful.

Iraq is experiencing what has been called a “creeping normal-ization,” which is not to say that life is normal for most Iraqis. The daily and monthly death tolls are still unacceptably high if the coun-try is to rebuild its economy and public life. The al-Qaeda-affiliated group known as the Islamic State of Iraq has claimed responsibility for several of the recent bombings, although Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also has blamed remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. The bombers appear determined to show that Maliki’s U.S.-backed government cannot provide secu-rity in place of American troops — now largely confined to bases and scheduled to pull out this year — and are doing what they can to reignite the embers of sectarian

strife. The violence is expected to increase in the run-up to na-tional elections on March 7, as Iraq’s Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities vie for power.

The United States can con-tinue to provide the Iraqi gov-ernment with intelligence and other support to battle ex-tremists, as well as advice for strengthening governance. But it is up to the Iraqis now to finish the business of political reconciliation. Besides holding another fair election, they must build an impartial judicial sys-tem, continue to integrate dis-affected Sunnis into the Shiite-dominated military and political process, and figure out how to divide power and resources be-tween the central and provincial governments, particularly in the Kurdish region. This is what will bring the death toll down even further and prevent the country’s return to civil war.

Iraq gradually becoming less deadly

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Daniel Brownsan jose mercury news

ST. LOUIS — Isaac Bruce said he wanted to be remembered in the NFL as "a man of no reputa-tion." So it was appropriate that he practically snuck out Sunday.

Bruce started the game, took part in one running play and then called it a day, perhaps a career.

Only later, when he was dressed in sweats and back on the sideline, did he get a proper sendoff. A shot of him on the scoreboard prompt-ed cheers of "Bruuuuuuce" from the Rams fans and hugs from his reverential 49ers teammates.

"I can control my emotions. If I was going to cry, it nearly came, but it didn't come all the way out," Bruce said. "I was touched, truly touched, by the gesture."

Bruce continued to hold back on a retirement decision. Earlier in the week, he said the odds of walking away from the game were 75 percent. Asked if anything had changed, he said, "Now it's 76 per-cent."

If he steps away, Bruce, 37, re-tires as the NFL's second all-time leading receiver. His 15,208 yards trail only Jerry Rice (22,895).

Bruce's production this year was minimal, just 21 catches for 264 yards, but he is beloved as a mentor to the 49ers young receiv-ers.

"His character far exceeds the type of player that he is," coach Mike Singletary said.

Based on this season's finish, the 49ers' opponents for 2010 are set.

At home, they will face the Raiders, Broncos, Buccaneers, Saints, Arizona, Seattle, St. Louis and Philadelphia.

On the road, they will face Green Bay, San Diego, Kansas City, Carolina, Atlanta, Arizona, Seattle and St. Louis.

Several news outlets raised the possibility that one of the 49ers' "home" games would be an NFL showcase game in London. The Sacramento Bee, citing anony-mous sources, reported that the 49ers might face the Eagles over-seas in October.

Running back Frank Gore scored on a pair of short runs, giv-ing him 10 rushing touchdowns for the season.

That ties the 49ers record for rushing touchdowns previously shared by Derek Loville (1995), Ricky Watters (1993), Billy Kilmer (1961), J.D. Smith (1959) and Joe Perry (1953).

Gore also rushed for 107 yards Sunday, his 20th 100-yard game. That ties Perry for the most in franchise history.

"It's great," Gore said. "It's been an up-and-down year for me."

He came close to the end zone one other time against the Rams. He took a screen pass 22 yards to the cusp of the goal line. That set up Moran Norris, the fullback and close friend of Gore, who scored his first career touchdown.

"That's why I got tackled at the

1-yard line," Gore joked.Alex Smith's final stat line: 225

of 372 (60.5 percent), 2,350 yards, 18 touchdowns, 12 interceptions and an 81.5 quarterback rating.

The 49ers finished 5-1 in the NFC West. Their only division loss

was a 20-16 flop at Seattle on Dec. 16.

Shane Andrus, signed because kickers Joe Nedney (hamstring) and Ricky Schmitt (groin) were injured, was 4 for 4 on extra points and did not attempt a field goal.

The 49ers allowed 97.0 rush-ing yards a game this season. That's their best since 1997, when they allowed 85.4 rushing yards.

The last time the 49ers finished at .500 was in 1967, when they were 7-7.

The man with no reputation nears end of his career

mcclatchy-tribune49ers wide receiver stands as the NFL’s second all-time leading receiver. With most of those numbers com-ing from his tenure in St. Louis, he has accumulated 1,024 catches for 15,208 yards in his career.

Sports

MUSTANG DAILYSPoRTSmustangdaily.net

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

sports editor: Brian De Los Santosmustangdailysports@gmail.com

ryan sidarto mustang daily file photoBuilding on a 42-26 lead at the half, the Mustangs defeated the Anteaters 95-81 in their first Big West conference game of the season. Senior guard Lorenzo Keeler led the Mus-tangs (4-8, 1-0 Big West) in scoring with a career-high 38 points. Cal Poly had surrendered three straight contests before posting their second road win of the season against the ant-eaters. Freshman guard Kyle Odister was the next Mustang behind Keeler with 23 points.

ryan sidarto mustang daily file photoJunior guard Rachel Clancy posted a new career high with 24 points in a 73-61 win against UC Irvine Monday night. Cal Poly (8-4,1-0 Big West) posted its third win in a row, while also recording its first conference win of the season. Junior forward Kristina Santiago posted her second double-double of the season with 19 points and 11 rebounds. Three Anteaters scored double figures against the Mustangs.

Conover named track and field/cross country directormustang daily staff report

After coaching the men’s cross country team to its seventh straight and 10th overall Big West Confer-ence Championship last fall, Mark Conover has been named the new Director of Track and Field / Cross Country for Cal Poly.

Conover replaces previous direc-tor Terry Crawford, who resigned last summer after 18 years at Cal Poly in order to accept a position with USA Track and Field as direc-tor of coaching.

“Mark emerged as the right candidate for this position among a very talented pool of candidates,” Cal Poly Director of Athletics Alison Cone said. “Mark has demonstrated his ability to recruit and develop elite athletes and has a vision for continu-ing the success and tradition of the Cal Poly track and field program.”

Conover is currently in his 14th season at Cal Poly and has led the Mustangs to 11-consecutive appear-ances at the NCAA Cross Coun-try Championships, six of those as a team. He has coached the men’s team to four top-20 finishes, includ-ing 13th in 2003, 10th in 2004, 13th in 2006 and 11th in 2007.

“I am honored to be selected as the director of track and field and cross country at Cal Poly,” Conover said. “To be in the position to lead

the program into the next decade is a coach’s dream. Cal Poly offers every-thing that is necessary when it comes to having a successful program due to its prestigious academic standing and the ‘learn by doing’ experience that is offered to the student-athlete in a setting that is second to none.”

Conover has been named the Big West Conference Men’s Coach of the Year eight times and the United States Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA) West Region Coach of the Year twice (2000 and 2003).

“I am thankful to Alison Cone for providing me with this opportu-nity, which I view as the byproduct of hard work, passion, dedication, commitment and loyalty to the uni-versity,” Conover added.

During his tenure at Cal Poly, Conover has coached a pair of two-time All-Americans in both track and cross country. He has coached 23 NCAA West Region men’s and women’s track and field qualifiers and 28 individual NCAA All-West Region men and women in cross country.

“I look forward to providing a positive environment that will al-low the student-athlete to obtain academic and athletic excellence. I also look forward to recruiting and coaching bright, energetic and pas-sionate young men and women who

seek the outstanding education and athletic opportunity that Cal Poly offers.”

Conover also has coached 26 Big West Conference individual cham-pions in track and cross country, pro-duced three Big West Conference Track Athletes of the Year, seven Big

West Cross Country Athletes of the Year, two Freshman Track Athletes of the Year and six Freshman Cross Country Athletes of the Year.

He has coached 27 men and women to Cal Poly top-10 all-time track and field marks, including the school record-holder in the men’s 5,000 meters and women’s steeple-chase.

The women’s cross country team, which he assisted before assuming

full duties, had its highest conference finish in eight years in 2009 (third). Women’s cross country also earned NCAA All-Academic team honors in 2007 and won the 2004-05 and 2007-08 Big West Conference team GPA awards.

“Cal Poly has a long-standing tradition of excellence in the sports of track and field and cross coun-try, with numerous All-Americans as well as alumni who went on to become Olympians,” Conover said. “That fact, combined with the num-ber of successful coaches who came before me and the number of alumni who are currently successful high school and collegiate coaches, truly make it special to be the director of track and field and cross country at Cal Poly. The program has a special place in the hearts of many alumni and fans of the sport who have been associated with Cal Poly.”

Conover coached the Cal Poly athlete of the year in 2007 as well as the Big West Conference scholar-athlete of the year in 2005 and the Cal Poly scholar-athlete of the year in both 2005 and 2008.

Conover was a nine-time All-American distance runner at Hum-boldt State and earned the rare distinction of becoming an All-American in all three NCAA di-visions (I, II and III). He was the national champion in the 10,000

meters in track in 1981 and in cross country, also in 1981.

In 1988, Conover was the Olym-pic Trials Champion in the mara-thon and went on to run at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He competed pro-fessionally from 1984-96 and was a four-time U.S. Olympic Trials quali-fier.

A graduate of Miramonte High School in Orinda, Calif., Conover earned his bachelor’s degree in natu-ral resource planning and interpre-tation at Humboldt State in 1983 and earned his master’s degree at Cal Poly in city and regional planning in 1989.

Conover was inducted into the Humboldt State University Hall of Fame in 1993.

I look forward to providing a positive environment that will allow the stu-dent-athlete to ob-tain academic and athletic excellence.

—Mark ConoverCal Poly track and field/cross country director

Men’s and women’s basketball sweep UC Irvine to begin conference play