While it isn't official, the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Condition is set to issue a ruling accepting all of Metro's recent designations of urban and rural reserves, without amendment, according to Metro councilor Robert Liberty. The decision, which was set to be announced last Friday and delayed, is expected this Friday (the 29th). Quite a few objections and amendments were raised to the LCDC, which rejected the lot of them. The LCDC only has authority to rule on legal objections, not technical objections.

While the LCDC is expected to approve the designations, it did have a few sharp words for the process--suggesting that Senate Bill 1011, the 2007 legislation which created the urban/rural reserves designations, results in a more politicized process than the prior method. This claim drew a rebuke from Mr. Liberty, who articulated the opposite opinion--that the UR/RR process involves more technical analysis, and less horsetrading, then before.

One example of that, of course, is the Stafford Basin. The basin, an area which is surrounded by urbanization on three sides, bisected by I-205, and is too hilly to be useful for agriculture, had nonetheless resisted any urban designations for years--unsurprising given that its full of wealthy homeowners living on large lots. The three cities bordering the basin--West Linn, Lake Oswego, and Tualatin, all oppose its inclusion, and were busy trying to convince the LCDC to overrule Metro on its inclusion.

Other parties bound to be disappointed by the upcoming ruling include 1000 Friends of Oregon, who were hoping that LDCD would overturn the inclusion of Washington County farmland in the Cornelius area into the urban reserves. It would be interesting to see how Bob Stacey, should he win next Tuesday, goes about implementing a decision he disagrees with.

1. First you must follow my blog and say you do and how I know who you are.
2. Become a fan of Urban Sprout Baby Boutique's Facebook and tell them I sent you there and why you are there.
3. Become a fan of Coupon Mommy of 3's Facebook and leave me a note
4. Last follow Urban Sprout Baby Boutique's Blog

• As we all know, Urban Sprout Baby Boutique is trying to reach 1000 fans on their facebook, so for every person you refer to their page, have them leave a note and you earn an extra entry and just note here who added to their page.
• Also, Urban Sprout Baby Boutique's blog only has 11 followers, lets get her some followers and get your friends to follow her.  For each person that follows, you earn an extra entry, they just need to note who sent them.

If you are one of those people given to rending your garments when confronted with bad polling data, the Wrap has one piece of advice: come back in a half hour when the Diary Rescue gets posted.

Yes, friends, today was a buffet of ugly, from the release of the second set of Ayers McHenry (GOP) polls of competitive House races to yucky numbers from SurveyUSA on an open Democratic House seat. Even Rasmussen was giving us the full Ras today.

Properly warned, feel free to trudge forward into a decidedly pessimistic Thursday edition of the Wrap...

THE U.S. SENATE

AK-Sen: Primary fallout continues in the wake of Miller-Murkowski
James L. over at Swing State Project opened the day with an excellent synopsis of the most recent events in Alaska in the wake of the improbable defeat of incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski. Senator Mark Begich has effectively slammed the door on the "Democratic Switcheroo" thing by backing the man who won the Democratic nomination Tuesday night: Sitka Mayor Scott McAdams. Profiles of McAdams are starting to pop up, and it is hard not to like what you see. Meanwhile, the state's Libertarian Party is not slamming the door on the notion of Murkowski replacing their nominee and running under the Libertarian banner in November. Miller's lead of under 1700 votes now goes to the absentees, which Murkowski would have to win by a sizeable margin to overturn the apparent result.

CO-Sen: Bennet rebuts Ipsos poll, Buck caught being a hypocrite
Two news items out of the state of Colorado today. In the wake of a seriously ugly Ipsos poll out yesterday (which gave GOPer Ken Buck a nine-point lead over Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet), Bennet decided to release an internal poll which stood in pretty stark contrast to the Ipsos poll. Bennet's poll, conducted late last week by Harstad Research, gave the Democrat a four point lead (44-40) over Ken Buck.

Buck, for his part, is joining fellow anti-government conservative Ron Johnson of Wisconsin in the club of hypocrites who, in their pasts, have had their hands outstretched before the government coffers. In Buck's case, it is more recent: as recently as 2007, he sought millions of dollars in earmarks via his then-local congresswoman (the infamous Marilyn Musgrave).

CT-Sen: WWE combatant's death refuses to go away as father speaks up
The most stringent criticism of Connecticut GOP Senate nominee Linda McMahon comes today from the father of the former WWE wrestler who passed away earlier in the month at the age of 29. Harley McNaught, whose son Lance Cade worked for the McMahons for most of the past decade, had particularly harsh words for how the couple conducted their business:

"[Cade] would have cut his arm off for Vince McMahon, but it wasn't there in return," his father said. "He don't care any more than the man in the moon for them, other than as dollar signs."

McNaught was planning to grieve in silence, but was driven to speak after Linda McMahon coldly dismissed Cade's passing by noting that she "might have met him once", and insisting that the company was not responsible for his death, or the deaths of any other ex-employees.

KY-Sen: Mongiardo offers backhanded endorsement of Conway
Apparently, three months has not been long enough for Democratic Lt. Governor Dan Mongiardo to get over his narrow defeat at the hands of Democratic Senate nominee Jack Conway. In a local media interview, Mongiardo reiterated that he would be supporting Conway, but his rationale was, to say the least, strained: "I don’t think that Jack is the best in the state, but he’s a heck of lot better than who he’s running against. That’s why I have to support him."

LA-Sen: Vitter a lock to win GOP primary on Saturday, says PPP
Geez, has any candidate in the 2010 cycle entered the fray with more hype, and been a bigger underachiever, than former state judge Chet Traylor in Louisiana? According to a new poll by PPP, the man who was expected to give incumbent Republican David Vitter a serious fight is sitting at a whopping 5% of the vote, exactly one percent ahead of totally unheralded perennial candidate Nick Accardo. Vitter, for what it is worth, is sitting on 81% of the GOP primary vote.

Meanwhile, Vitter did get some unwanted media attention today, when the New Orleans Times-Picayune uncovered a nearly five-digit expenditure by Vitter's campaign for "strategy" to his first cousin, who, as it happens, is deeply underwater financially. Vitter's crew is pooh-poohing the timing, arguing that his cousin did legit work handling the direct mail for this Saturday's primary. Recall, however, that the somewhat hyped House campaign of Oregon Republican Sid Leiken was upended by a similar charge late last year.

MO-Sen: MSU poll says Carnahan within striking distance of Blunt
Missouri State University is out with new data in the Show Me State, and their numbers certainly go against the grain. The pollster, in conjunction with KY3, polled the race and found Republican Congressman Roy Blunt only up 49-48 against Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. Most recent polling, including our own survey conducted by PPP, put Blunt ahead by a wider margin, usually in the upper single-digits. One reason to wonder about the partisan makeup of the sample: President Obama's approval in the state (47%) is higher than most pollsters nationally, which has certainly not been mimicked by other pollsters who have come into Missouri.

NC-Sen: Dem challenger calls for Simpson ouster
I am more than willing to be corrected, but this has to be one of the first top-tier 2010 candidates calling for Alan Simpson's head in the wake of his "310 million tits" tirade. Elaine Marshall, who is locked in a tight battle with Republican incumbent Richard Burr in the Tar Heel State, called for Simpson to resign during an address celebrating Women's Equality Day (today is the 90th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment). Marshall sharply criticized Simpson, saying his remarks were demeaning to women as well as Social Security recipients.

PA-Sen: Another poll gives Toomey modest lead...but there's a catch
The outcome of the U.S. Senate race in the Keystone State may well depend on how good the polling crew at Franklin and Marshall College (PDF file) is at constructing a likely voter screen. The pollster gives Republican Patrick Toomey a nine-point edge over Democrat Joe Sestak (40-31) among those voters identified as "likely voters." Among all registered voters, however, that margin whittles down to just three points (31-28). Another thing long evident in F&M polls, they sure as all Hell aren't pushing leaners very hard. That, or the good people of Pennsylvania are just chronically indecisive.

THE U.S. HOUSE

MA-09: Heard of speed dating? How about speed debating?
Good grief: Stephen Lynch, the Massachusetts Democrat who was one of the most shocking "nay" votes for HCR back in the Spring, had promised his primary rival, Mac D'Alessandro, that he would participate in a primary debate. And so he will...for fifteen minutes. The two will participate in a debate consisting of a single segment on a weekend news program on WBZ-TV. Talk about respecting the letter, but not the spirit, of the promise...

MO-03: Carnahan office attack not motivated by ideology
News that ought to come as a bit of a relief: Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan revealed today that the firebombing of his campaign office last week appears to be the work of a disgruntled ex-employee, and not motivated by any other cause. The attack occurred on August 17th, and the suspect apparently had just been fired from his job with the Carnahan campaign, where he had worked for only a week.

MO-04/MO-07/MO-08: Everyone holds their own in new public poll
The Missouri State crew (referenced earlier in their surprisingly optimistic poll of the Senate race) also polled a trio of House races in the Show-Me state. Before I get to the numbers, a word of caution: the sample sizes here are unbelievably tiny (ranging from 171-198 respondents), therefore the margin of error on these subsamples is quite lofty. In the most anticipated battle among these three districts (MO-04), the MSU poll sees Democratic incumbent Ike Skelton hanging on versus Republican Vicky Hartzler by a fairly solid margin (47-35). In the southeastern-based 8th district, well-funded Democrat Tommy Sowers hasn't apparently made much of a dent in this uber-red district, as GOP incumbent Jo Ann Emerson has a huge advantage (64-17). And, in the open seat race in the 7th district to replace Roy Blunt, the GOP looks likely to hold, as Republican Billy Long leads Democrat Scott Eckersley by a better than two-to-one ratio (51-23).

NC-08: Kissell releases poll with a double-digit edge
One prominent exception to the "crappy polls today for Democrats" theme comes from North Carolina freshman Congressman Larry Kissell. The rookie Democrat offers up an internal poll from Anzalone-Liszt Research showing him with a seventeen-point edge (49-32) over Republican challenger Harold Johnson. Kissell easily knocked Rep. Robin Hayes out of office in 2008 after narrowly missing victory in 2006.

OH-17: Traficant's comeback gets a reprieve...for the moment
His resurrection is not yet complete, but former Congressman (and prisoner) Jim Traficant got some unexpected good news yesterday, when Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner broke a local canvassing board deadlock and allowed Traficant the opportunity to prove that he had collected enough signatures to be accepted onto the November ballot. Traficant had been filing to appear in his former home district (currently held by Democrat Tim Ryan) as an Independent.

OR-05: Schrader fights Bruun internal polling with data of his own
Wish I was seeing this more often in this particular election cycle. Just one day after Republican rival Scott Bruun released internal polling claiming he enjoyed a lead over Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader, Schrader provided some evidence to the contrary. Schrader's poll (which was done in late July by Lake Research) had the incumbent up double digits on Bruun (46-35). The district is a swingy district that slightly preferred GW Bush in 2004, and then went by a far clearer margin for Barack Obama in 2008.

PA-08: GOP poll claims Patrick Murphy latest Democrat to be behind
The usual caveats apply with internal polls, but the campaign of former Republican Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick is claiming that the GOP nominee is on his way to getting his old job back. The poll, from Public Opinion Strategies, gives Fitzpatrick a 48-41 lead over sophomore Democrat Patrick Murphy. Murphy defeated Fitzpatrick for the right to represent the 8th Congressional District in 2006.

WA-03: SUSA poll says GOP pickup likely in southwestern Washington
This is another in a series of painfully pessimistic polls for House Democrats courtesy of the polling crew at SurveyUSA. SUSA heads to the southwestern corner of Washington State, where Democrats are defending a tough open seat with the retirement of Brian Baird. According to the poll, the defense is going poorly: GOP nominee Jaime Herrera is staked to a 54-41 lead over Democrat Denny Heck.

BATTLE FOR THE HOUSE: Midwest leaning GOP, at least according to GOP
Republican pollsters Ayers McHenry, at the best of the GOP think tank American Action Forum, is back with their second round of House polling, and it is every bit as ugly as the first round of polling early last week. However, there is a caveat that goes beyond the usual "hey, it is a partisan poll" caveat. If you look at the actual scripts employed by the pollster, you will see (PDF file) that the topline question is not asked until question #12. Among the questions asked before are issue questions, which the National Council on Public Polls has noted can skew results.

With that mega-caveat out of the way, here are the numbers from the GOP polls:

IA-03: Brad Zaun (R) 51%, Rep. Leonard Boswell (D) 41%
IN-02: Rep. Joe Donnelly (D) 46%, Jackie Walorski (R) 44%
MI-07: Tim Walberg (R) 50%, Mark Schauer (D) 40%
MO-03: Rep. Russ Carnahan (D) 54%, Ed Martin (R) 38%
OH-01: Steve Chabot (R) 47%, Rep. Steve Driehaus (D) 45%
OH-13: Rep. Betty Sutton (D) 43%, Tom Ganley (R) 41%
OH-15: Steve Stivers (R) 49%, Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D) 44%
OH-16: Jim Renacci (R) 49%, John Boccieri (D) 35%
WI-08: Reid Ribble (R) 49%, Rep. Steve Kagen (D) 39%

THE GUBERNATORIAL RACES

PA-Gov: F&M poll shows same GOP lead and wide RV/LV gap
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the Franklin and Marshall poll in the gubernatorial race is somewhat of a carbon copy (PDF) of the Senate race. A big lead for the Republican nominee (in this case, state AG Tom Corbett) among likely voters, but one within the margin of error with registered voters. And, as in the Senate race, a metric ton of undecideds. This poll puts Corbett up by eleven points (39-28) among likely voters, but by just a single point (29-28) with registered voters.

VT-Gov: Super-tight Democratic primary to be certified next week
Herein lies one of the advantages to being one of the lesser populated states of the Union. We will almost certainly know by this time on Tuesday who will be the Democratic nominee for Governor in Vermont. That is the word from Secretary of State Deb Markowitz, who is in the somewhat awkward position of certifying a brutally close election in which she appears to have run in third place, but less than 1000 points behind the winner. That apparent winner, state legislator Peter Shumlin, is declaring victory, which brought a slight amount of tension to the Unity Rally held there yesterday at the behest of respected senior Senator Patrick Leahy. Shumlin's declaration and expressions of confidence were declared "inappropriate" by the campaign manager for Doug Racine, the apparent runner-up.

THE RAS-A-POLL-OOZA

Rasmussen is giving the GOP no small amount of love today. They hit the Florida Senate race, where they become the first pollster in forever to give Marco Rubio a double-digit edge. They also give Meg Whitman her biggest lead of the campaign, as well.

CA-Gov: Meg Whitman (R) 48%, Jerry Brown (D) 40%
FL-Sen: Marco Rubio (R) 40%, Charlie Crist (I) 30%, Kendrick Meek (D) 21%
NM-Gov: Susana Martinez (R) 48%, Diane Denish (D) 43%
UT-Sen: Mike Lee (R) 54%, Sam Granato (D) 29%

James Corless, Director of the Transportation for America Campaign, is in Portland tomorrow and 1000 Friends of Oregon is hosting a reception.

A few days ago, I wrote an article about the top 10 highest ranked recruiting classes since Rivals introduced their class ranking method. 

You can read that piece here .

Well, I'm not done with Rivals yet. I've spent the better part of this week compiling data on recruiting classes, because it's a slow, summer-y work week, and apparently, that's what I do to pass the time.

Anyway, I was looking for a hierarchy as far as base talent goes. This obviously does little to settle a "X conference is better than Y!" as there is more to football than just fielding the most talented team.

Still, my data shows that the most talented teams have held a monopoly on the BCS championship since 2002 (possibly since the BCS' 1998 inception, I don't have recruiting data prior to 2002, though).

Of the eight schools that have played in national championship games since 2002, five come from the top six recruiting schools and all eight fall into the twelve (FSU narrowly edges out Oklahoma as the fifth best recruiting school otherwise the top five would be five for five).

If I piqued your interest, here are the top 12 best recruiting schools since 2002 (in descending order)

USC
Florida
LSU
Texas
FSU
Oklahoma
Georgia
Miami
Tennessee
Michigan
Alabama
Ohio State

At the very least, talent is correlated to success. Before you throw Boise State or some other non–AQ at me, know that those schools are at or near the top of the recruiting pile for their conferences for most years.

Now, the argument of the 2000s has been "The esS-eEe-Cee is thuh best confuhrance evurrrrr."  While that statement is impossible to prove, the following facts are usually used as evidence:

The SEC has won four straight national championships
The SEC has the best bowl record of the major conferences
SEC SPEEEEED!

The first two are irrefutable, though not necessarily proof of any SEC advantage. The third is simply fun to tout as fact to piss off the slower, brainy Big 10levenwelve fans who hate hearing about the SEC all day.

The truth is, it's virtually impossible to say one major conference is better than another.  Better is too vague a word.

We can, however, determine which conference starts out with the most talent. 

Again, this does not mean better, and it doesn't even mean that the conference is in fact more talented. It means that the conference starts out with the best recruits, which should mean the best chance to have the most talent.

In order to do this, I took the average Rivals.com recruiting scores for each BCS conference along for each of the last nine years as well as the total average recruiting score for each conference.

I didn't do the Non–AQs, with the exception of the BCS bowl attendees because the non–AQ conferences suck at recruiting. Regardless, none of those teams matter here.  This is big vs. big only beginning with the lowest scoring conference, the Big East.

Big East– 723.35 points

The Big East clocks in as the only BCS conference to hold a mean score under 1,000 points. 

This has nothing to do with the fact that the conference only has eight teams (at least on the surface) and everything to do with the fact that the conference lost Miami and Virginia Tech, its most powerful recruiting teams, to expansion.

In the two years that Miami and VA Tech were in the Big East, the conference averaged 1245.25 and 1336.25 points. Those numbers put the Big East at fifth best, just ahead of the Big 10.

In 2005, the conference plummeted to a 382.86 points average, and although it climbed out of Sun-Belt territory once the conference became more stable, the Big East never again crosses the 1000 point average threshold.

There is a distinct power gap here. The best Big East team is as loaded as a middle–tier team from any other power conference, or a bottom 33 percent team from the SEC. Since the contraction/expansion, no Big East squad has crossed the 1500 points mark, much less the 2000 points threshold that every BCS champion has crossed.

Big 10 – 1020.79 points

This should come as no surprise to anyone who really follows college football. It's hard to get kids to go to school up North when there are plenty of elite schools in areas without a real winter.

The biggest difference between the Big 10 and the Big East is that the Big 10 has a couple of real power schools. Both Michigan and Ohio State fell within the top 11 recruiting schools. 

However, after Michigan and OSU, there is a big drop off. Penn State and Michigan State both have sporadic recruiting success, but both find themselves near the bottom of the Big 10 during some years.

This lack of depth lands the Big 10 in the five-spot.

ACC– 1085.42 points

The ACC has a strong top with Miami, FSU, Clemson, UNC (under Butch Davis), but the lack of consistency from the middle of the road teams and a large number of bad recruiters (Duke, GT, Wake) keep the ACC in the middle of the pack. 

The three conferences who recruit better than the ACC have at least one school with a Rivals recruiting score of 2000 or better each year. The ACC fails to break that mark three times. Still, with two schools in the top 10 for recruiting, the ACC definitely has the talent to compete.

Big 12– 1173.17 points

This could be the only upset on the list. The conference that has placed two teams in the last three BCS championship games as well as Texas again in 2005 falls behind USC and friends in terms of recruiting.

If you're going to blame something, blame size (also, Baylor). The Big 12 has more teams over the 1,000 points mark than the Pac 10. It also has more teams over the 2000 points mark than the Pac 10.

However, the Pac 10 only has 10 teams, which means everything counts for a little bit more on average. If you go by Median, the Big 12 is second. Replace USC with any other school, and the Big 12 is second. 

However, I'm using mean to rank, and USC is a Pac 10 member so the possibly real–life stronger Big 12 takes the bronze.

Pac 10– 1219.44 points

This is 100 percent USC. USC is the best recruiting school in the nation, with an average score of 2589.89 points. To put that in perspective, the best Big 12 recruiter, Texas, trails by over 400 points at 2178.78 points.

The rest of the Pac 10 is pretty average in terms of recruiting. Oregon, Cal, and UCLA play a good rotating second chair, but none are up to par of the ACC, Big 12, or SEC's No. twos. 

The large disparity between USC and the rest of the conference probably explains why the Trojans won the Pac 10 for all but one of the nine years the recruiting data covers.

By that same logic, the large disparity between money USC was paying recruits and the broke-ass lives the recruits from other Pac 10 schools were living probably explains the large disparity in USC's recruiting and the rest of the Pac 10.

USC is elite, the rest of the Pac 10 is just decent, although they're trending upward.  Oregon has placed in the top 20 in three of the last four seasons and all that Nike influence could send some would–be Trojan five stars to Eugene during USC's timeout.

SEC– 1526.99 points

The 307 point gap between the SEC and the Pac 10 marks the largest disparity between any two consecutive Be conferences on this list. In the SEC, recruiting is everything, and the teams in the conference do it better than anyone.

Of the six power conferences, four conferences average one or more 2,000 point teams per year (ACC, Pac 10, Big 12, SEC). The Big 12 checks into second place with 1.56 teams per year, but that number crumbles compared to the SEC's 3.67 per year.

The 2,000 point cutoff basically means the team is one of the top 10 recruiters in the nation for that given year. So, on average, the SEC gets over three teams into the top 10 nationally. 

In fact, if you look at the top recruiters again, you'll see just that. Five of the top teams are SEC teams. A sixth, Auburn lurks just outside the top 12. Half the league is as loaded as the best schools in the country.

Look at the list again: Florida, Alabama, LSU, Georgia, Tennessee, Auburn. Do those teams sound familiar? 

Three of them can claim a BCS title in the last three years along with five of the last eight championships. Auburn has the 13–0 season where they got muscled out of a championship chance during that stretch as well. 

Georgia has a Sugar Bowl massacre, which set Non–AQs back a year, a possible claim to best team of 2007 as well as two more BCS appearances. Tennessee hasn't done much recently, but they do have a BCS title, even if it's in the way–back–when year of 1998. 

We're at the halfway point of the league and still talking about the national stage.

Additionally, almost nine members break the 1,000 point barrier per year, putting, on average, 75 percent of the conference in the top 35 teams nationally.

Does that settle it? Is the SEC better? No to both questions. For one, getting talent isn't as important as developing it. 

Look at where Tennessee sits on that list, ninth. How many BCS bowls have they been to during that period? How many losing seasons have they had during that period? If you answered "zero" and "same as Michigan," you are correct!

Both teams can recruit; neither is doing a whole lot with it right now.

Take everything you've read here with a grain of salt if you're going to use it to take any side on the "best" argument. As for me, I'll say this: the SEC may not be the best and it may not be the most talented, but it is certainly putting itself in the best position to be both.

This piece was co-authored by Ross Macfarlane.

Sens. Kerry (D-Mass) and Lieberman (I-Conn) finally
released
the American Power Act (APA) on Wednesday, May 11, after
months of
internal negotiations, and nearly a year after the House passed its
comprehensive climate and energy bill, (the American Clean Energy
and
Security Act or ACES). Climate Solutions is still reviewing its
nearly 1000
pages, and will be developing more detailed responses and priorities for
our
advocacy work. But we wanted to provide
some high level reactions to our friends and supporters, and highlight
some of
the areas that we will be working on to strengthen and improve. We will
be updating you on our thoughts, and
would appreciate hearing yours.

At the end of this memo, we have included a list of sources we have
used
for our initial analysis which includes good resources for those who
would like
more details on the APA’s provisions. We
want to single out the great work by Eric
  De Place at Sightline, who also helped us with our
briefing call for key business and community leaders.

We will continue working for the strongest possible bill that limits
global warming pollution, reduces our dependence on fossil fuels, and
accelerates innovation and investment in clean and efficient energy. 
Our advocacy focuses on mobilizing our
efforts and friends to fight for the best policy possible, incorporating
the
strongest provisions from a number of bills and policy proposals into
the final
product. We are particularly
appreciative of the tremendous contributions of Sens. Cantwell and
Collins
in the CLEAR Act, and believe their focus on a simple, fair approach is
having
a positive influence as the Senate moves forward. 

A note on the spirit of these comments, and the difficult
situation we face as advocates for real climate solutions: 
Like every piece of major legislation in our
somewhat dysfunctional political system, this one will bear the scars of
fear-based special interest politics and insufficient ambition. We will
keep fighting hard for what’s right
and necessary, while understanding (at the risk of echoing Sec.
Rumsfeld) that
we have to go to the policy field with the Congress we’ve got. In every
major climate bill that sees the
light of day, we can expect (without condoning) big problems; but there
are few
problems bigger than continuing to fail to respond to the climate
crisis. If we can find a way to move in a positive
direction, we need to move. This may
well include provisions of the APA as well as other bills, including the
CLEAR
Act. We’re focused on the destination
more than the vehicles.

Our first cut on the American Power Act’s provisions:

Limiting global warming pollution

Our top priority for comprehensive climate
and clean energy legislation is that it puts us firmly on the path to
rapidly
reducing fossil fuel dependence and building a strong clean energy
economy. Science-based limits on global
warming pollution are an essential foundation for that policy. We
need a declining cap on emissions to
send clear market signals that accelerate deployment and unlock
innovation in
clean and efficient energy solutions and to responsibly address the
climate
crisis. 

The APA establishes reduction targets for
covered sources of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. While
these reductions are not steep enough,
especially in the near-term, they do track with President Obama’s
commitments
in Copenhagen,
ACES, and other proposals considered in Congress. The bill includes
provisions which allow
adjustment of the targets to the best available science. What is
scientifically necessary may not yet
be politically possible. We will continue to advocate for doing the
whole job.

Because of the central importance of the
emissions cap, we elaborate on it more than other features:

Structure of the cap

The bill takes a somewhat different approach than ACES (or other
legislative proposals)—a “sectoral” approach rather than an
economy-wide cap
or trading system. It establishes caps
that are phased in for four primary sectors—electricity generation,
industrial
sources, natural gas, and petroleum-based fuels. Together, these sectors
account for
approximately 85 percent of national emissions. Electrical utilities and petroleum based transportation fuels are
covered starting in 2013, and the largest industrial emitters and
natural gas
companies are phased in beginning in 2016.

For transportation, the bill requires the petroleum companies to
purchase allowances for the carbon emissions caused by their fuels at a
price
set by the market for other sources. The
transportation sector is directly subject to the declining cap on carbon
emissions, and oil companies will pay a price set by the market for
these
permits.

Eric De Place at Sightline has a
good description of how this works. 

Offsets

Our biggest concern with the emissions reduction provisions in the
bill
relates to the excessive amount of offsets that are available (2 billion
tons
annually). This is not new or unique to this bill—these provisions are
largely unchanged from the ACES bill—but they do pose a significant
threat to
the integrity of the cap. The bill does establish oversight and
accountability
provisions that generally improve on the international standards and
ACES.
International offsets would be limited and
discounted (1.25 tons of international offsets are required for every
ton of
emissions covered). 

We strongly support projects that reliably store carbon or reduce
emissions in uncapped sectors like agriculture.
But they should not be used to excuse or “offset” a large proportion of
the energy sector emissions within the cap. And two billion tons is just
too much—enough to substantially
undermine the incentives for technology innovation and deployment in the
core
energy sectors. We’ll be advocating a
reduced scope for offsets and strong oversight to ensure they are
legitimate
and effective.

Market protections

The bill contains extensive provisions that limit the ability of
traders
to manipulate the market. It limits auction participation to the
companies that
are required to have permits. It also protects against synthetic
derivatives. The bill incorporates some
of the strong market protection provisions of Sen. Cantwell’s CLEAR
Act as
well as other efforts to better regulate markets. Again, Eric DePlace has
a very good description of the market
protection provisions and his opinion that they constitute an
improvement over
previous bills.

Price collars

As a method to reduce price volatility, the bill contains both a
ceiling
and floor on the price of carbon credits (which both escalate over the
period
of the reductions) and establishes a strategic reserve to reduce the
likelihood
that hitting the ceiling will “break the bank” by requiring EPA to issue
additional permits above the levels allowed by the cap. We oppose a
price ceiling, because it could
allow emissions in excess of the cap. At
minimum, we believe the ceiling should be higher and should escalate
more
rapidly to minimize the likelihood of exceeding the emission limits in
the
bill.  

Allocation of allowances

As in ACES, many of the emission allowances are distributed without
charge in the early years to electric and natural gas utilities, with
provisions requiring the value to be distributed to ratepayers to reduce
rate
impacts and promote energy efficiency (note:  the efficiency provisions
are a bit unclear
yet, and may not have the intended effect). 75 percent of the allowances would be distributed based on historical emissions
and 25 percent based on the load served (ACES had a 50/50 split). The bill also
follows ACES in allowing free
distribution in the initial years to trade-sensitive industries. A
substantial percentage of allowances are
allocated for public purposes, such as support for state programs,
deficit
reduction, protection of low income consumers, and transit projects that
reduce
GHGS (this transit and other “smart growth” funding is new and welcome
in the
APA—the kind of legitimate, carbon-reducing public purpose that merits
public
investment much more than, say, provisions that shift financial risk
from nuclear
operators to taxpayers.)

Over time, the percentage of free allowances will decline and the
amount
auctioned will increase. After 2026, an
increasing percentage of allowances will go to a trust fund which will
rebate
75 percent directly to households and allocate 25 percent to deficit reduction.

Climate Solutions has always
advocated an auction-based system and will continue to push for
transparency,
equity, and efficiency. The sky is a
public resource, and any proceeds from the private use of that resource
belong
to the public. It is important to
remember, however, that the allocation system does not directly affect
the
market signals or emission limits that are established by the declining
cap.

Consumer protection

As noted above, the bill provides significant protections through
utility rebates and (in the later years) direct refunds. It also
provides direct refunds for
low-income consumers who would be disproportionately affected by any
cost
increases and have done the least to cause global warming. We
strongly support
having good provisions that ensure that basic energy service is
affordable to
all.

The Clean Air Act and EPA authority

One of the areas of intense debate and concern is how new climate
policy
would affect EPA’s existing authorities to regulate climate pollution.
The carbon reduction provisions of APA are a
title of the Clean Air Act and would mark the first significant
expansion of
that Act since the 1990 Amendments (which established the Acid Rain
Program). EPA would be the entity primarily responsible
for implementation of the program. 

However, APA would reduce CAA authority in one key area: major
stationary sources. This is essentially the same approach taken
in the 1990 Amendments—when Congress replaced individual source
permitting
approaches with a sectoral cap. The APA
also establishes performance standards for coal-fired power plants built
after
2020, and allows EPA to set performance standards for older power
plants. It
would preserve existing Clean Air Act authority over mobile-source
emissions of
global warming pollution and other types of air pollution.   

We will be advocating for stronger preservation of EPA’s
existing authority, especially for the largest and dirtiest sources.
Some changes to existing authority are likely
given the scope of new authorities in the legislation, but it’s
imperative that
we emerge overall with a much more effective national commitment to
regulate
climate pollution.

State authorities

The APA appropriately allows states to retain most of their authority
to
regulate global warming pollution and promote clean and efficient
energy. The one major exception involves state cap-and-trade programs, like the one implemented in the Northeast States and
proposed in the Western States under the Western Climate Initiative,
which
would be preempted. States that have
implemented caps will get financial compensation for their lost
revenues. In the House bill, these programs were
suspended. While we prefer the House approach (or no preemption at all)
we will
likely be focusing our efforts on preserving the Bill’s broad retention
of
state authority and pushing for better funding and support for state
programs. This is likely to be an
area of continuing contention, and maintaining the ability for leading
states
to serve as pioneers and innovators is vital to our continuing progress.

Renewable energy and energy efficiency

APA’s energy efficiency and renewable energy provisions (standards
and
funding) are substantially weaker than ACES. In part, the reason is jurisdictional. In the House, a single committee
developed the energy and climate
portions of the bill. In the Senate, by
contrast, different committees have jurisdiction. The Senate Energy
committee
reported a bill (the American Clean Energy Leadership Act or ACELA) last
June,
that contains provisions on these issues, but they are generally much
weaker
than the comparable provisions of ACES. For example, ACELA contains a
national Renewable Power Standard that is weaker than what many experts predict will be achieved in a business as usual
scenario, without any new policy. 

We do note the addition of a Rural Energy
Savings Program, authored by Sen. Merkley, that will provide
substantial
efficiency benefits in rural communities. Energy efficiency and
renewable energy standards remain a critical
piece of any successful emission reduction and clean energy job creation
strategy; strengthening provisions will be a major focus for us.

The APA also contains far less financial support for state programs
that
promote energy efficiency and renewables than ACES. According to the
American Council For An
Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), APA only provides one quarter of the
state
funding for efficiency programs as ACES and much less funding
for gas utility programs to benefit consumers. ACEEE has estimated that
the House bill would save the average American
consumer $200 on their energy bills. One
issue that we will have to look at more closely, though, is the
potential
trade-offs between these funding mechanisms for state programs and
consumer
protection. For a variety of reasons,
the Senate Bill allocates less public funding overall, so the tradeoffs
become
somewhat more difficult. Since we
strongly support both clean energy and consumer protection, we need to
advocate
for solutions that provide adequate funding without “robbing Peter to
pay
Paul.” One obvious place to look for this funding is the extensive
giveaways to
dirty energy, discussed below.  

In addition to these examples, there are many important policies that
will promote energy efficiency and renewables that should be amended
into this
bill or adopted separately. These
include nationwide building codes, appliance and equipment efficiency
standards,
provisions to accelerate home and building efficiency (such as HOME STAR
and
BUILDING STAR), research and development support, renewal and expansion
of
incentive programs established under ARRA, and clean energy financing.
Many of these provisions were contained in
the House bill, and should be considered as part of a final package. A
number of the leading associations
representing renewable and energy efficiency businesses issued a joint
statement last month highlighting a number of areas that they believe
should be
included in a comprehensive climate and energy bill. 

Dirty energy giveaways

Presumably in an effort to find a path to 60 votes, the APA contains
unwarranted and inefficient subsidies to dirty, risky, and expensive
energy
sources. Nuclear power gets more than
$50 billion in federal loan guarantees, along with risk protection, cost
recovery
and streamlining/elimination of critical environmental and regulatory
reviews. Taxpayers should not be asked
to shoulder huge financial and other risks for a well-established
technology
like nuclear. And Senators who support
fiscal discipline and oppose big government should be the last to insist
on
such provisions.

The APA contains a large program to demonstrate carbon capture and
sequestration for coal plants. While we
support research into CCS, the amounts of money involved perpetuate a
huge
investment in coal fired generation, well in advance of any solid
evidence that
a cost-effective solution for disposing of carbon emissions is at
hand. We will advocate redirection of these
subsidies to clean energy sources that entail less risk and greater
public
benefit.

Offshore drilling

The recent disaster in the Gulf graphically illustrates the costs of
our
addiction to fossil fuels. The APA provisions on this issue are clearly a
work
in progress, and are being amended to respond to the enormous public
sentiment
and concerns from coastal state senators. On the one hand, the bill provides a financial incentive (revenue
sharing) for states that open their coastline to offshore drilling. On
the other hand, the bill provides veto
opportunities for states that would be affected by spills, and
institutes some
other protections. 

Climate Solutions has joined with
other groups in calling for a ban on new offshore drilling, at least
until a
full review of the Gulf disaster has been completed. We also support
the efforts of the Senators
in Washington, Oregon,
and California to ban drilling off our states,
as well as a stop to drilling in the sensitive and extremely hazardous
environments of the Beaufort and Chukchi
Seas off arctic Alaska.  Expanded fossil fuel exploration has no place in a climate bill,
since it demonstrably promotes increased emissions. And in the wake of
the Gulf oil disaster,
these provisions may well cost the bill more votes than it attracts.

Conclusion and recommendations for strengthening

The American Power Act is much less than we need and much more than
we
currently have for a national climate policy. It would, for the first time, establish a flawed but significant
national commitment to climate solutions. Given the ticking clocks of
climate change, the threats to our national
security, and the race to compete in the global clean energy economy, we
must
do everything possible to get the best possible bill enacted now. And
there are few signs that our
dysfunctional political system is going to make meaningful change easier
in the
next session or near future.

We urge the Senate to pass the strongest possible climate
and clean energy bill this year. Initial
priorities for strengthening the APA include:

So the APA is clearly a mixed bag. But we’re going to keep fighting—creating the political space for what
we need, and pushing the Senate to do more than it appears to believe it
can. We hope you’ll join us.

Related Links:

Friedman nails Obama for his timid response to the “environmental 9/11”

The American Power Act and California’s AB 32

Battle of the Carbon Titans

By Martin Burch of Portland, Oregon. Martin describes himself as a long-time active and extremely liberal Democrat interested in the local effect of environmental, infrastructure, transportation, energy, and defense policies. I’m for Rex for Metro president. I’ve met and spoken with all three candidates and personally like them all. Bob has a solid reputation after his 1000 Friends of Oregon...

Source : BlueOregon (subscribe)

Photo: Sightline DailyIn part 1, I described the appeal of and demand for electric bikes, and mentioned that three trends bode well for them in the Pacific Northwest and the rest of North America. Battery-juiced two-wheelers could finally break out of their current status as transportation novelties, helping us rise to challenges as great as climate change, oil addiction, and recession. In this post, I detail these trends.

Technology, overseas markets, and political trends all bring good portents for e-bikes.

Trend 1. Technical innovation keeps improving electric bikes. The latest Giant, with lithium ion batteries, reportedly has a real-life battery range of 50 miles, doubling what previous models achieved. Sanyo has introduced a European style city bike (pictured on the left) with impressive power-system integration.

Trek, a leading American bike maker has entered the e-bike market with designs that may prove appealing to muscle-powered cyclists because of their high-performance feel (pictured on the right).

Meanwhile, garage inventors keep coming up with intriguing innovations like the StokeMonkey (which I described previously); Electric Mountain Drive from Oregon’s Ecospeed (pictured atop this post); and this VoltWagon electrified trailer (pictured below) that hitches to a regular bike and hauls cargo effortlessly.

Luckily for e-bike makers, advanced battery research is in its heyday, thanks to billions of dollars of investment from public and private institutions around the world. The hunt is on for better batteries not only because they’re essential to electrifying transportation and getting the world off of oil but also because they’re needed to harness intermittent, renewable power sources such as the sun and the wind. As battery improvements emerge, electric bikes stand to gain quickly.

. . .

Trend 2. Electric bikes are spreading like wildfire in China and are catching on in parts of Europe as well. As David Goodman recently wrote in the New York Times:

In China, an estimated 120 million electric bicycles now hum along the roads, up from a few thousand in the 1990s. They are replacing traditional bikes and motorcycles at a rapid clip and, in many cases, allowing people to put off the switch to cars ... From virtually nothing a decade ago, electric bikes have become an $11 billion global industry.

In the Netherlands, a third of the money spent on bicycles last year went to electric-powered models. Industry experts predict similar growth elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, France and Italy, as rising interest in cycling coincides with an aging population. India had virtually no sales until two years ago, but its nascent market is fast expanding and could eclipse Europe’s in the next year.

China reportedly had 56,000 electric bikes in 1998. Getting to 120 million in 12 years’ time is a phenomenal change, even in a country as populous as China, and e-bikes don’t appear to be slowing: USA Today reports that sales in China are expected to reach a staggering 22 million in 2010 alone, bringing the number of e-bike owners in the country to one tenth of the population. It’s an impressive example of electrifying the transportation sector. It’s also good news for e-bike prices: mass production on that scale has brought production costs down, and just as Chinese-made motor cycles have spread quickly in Asia and Africa, e-bikes are now radiating from China as well.

. . .

Trend 3. Political trends are encouraging for electric bikes as well. Despite disappointment at Copenhagen and slow progress on a climate bill in Washington, D.C., climate change, oil addiction, and the chance to transition to a job-generating clean-energy economy remain potent political issues across much of the industrial world, prominently including the Pacific Northwest.

To seize the opportunity for a clean-energy revolution and move beyond carbon, we need to get completely off coal and oil quickly. Efficiency, compact communities, and transportation alternatives are our best friends in these tasks. But even with great success on all these strategies, we will still need some way to propel our trains, buses, trucks, and cars. The main no-carbon candidates are biofuels and electricity. We’ll need some of each, but electricity has tremendous advantages. It can come from many different carbon-free sources, can travel easily by wire, and can integrate the transportation sector with the rest of the electric grid in ways that make each stronger and more economical.

An impressive array of political and industry leaders have recognized and embraced the pivotal role the electrification of transportation can play in advancing a clean-energy economy. That’s why, for example, the 2009 U.S. federal stimulus included a bevy of investments in research on advanced batteries and electric vehicles.

Electrifying bikes is a perfect first step in pursuit of vehicle electrification, because battery-assisted two wheelers are an easier engineering challenge than are electric cars. Frank Jamerson of Electric Bike World Report told USA Today, “The electric bike is the first wave of the electrification of the personal transportation industry.”

Vehicle electrification is an energy storage problem, not a propulsion problem. Electric motors are much more efficient than fossil-fueled engines, but storing electricity is dramatically harder than is storing liquid fuels. For example, you can fill the tank of a gasoline-powered car in five minutes then drive on that fuel for several hours at highway speeds. Conversely, you need to recharge the Tesla Roadster, a $100,000 all-electric sports car, for roughly an hour for each hour of highway driving. (It takes 3.5 hours to charge fully. Its range is 244 miles, which it could cover in 3.5 hours at 70 mph. A Chevy Volt, which takes longer to recharge, has an electric-only range of 40 miles, after which it runs on a separate gasoline engine.)

Simple physics favor e-bikes over e-cars. Bicycles, even ones loaded with batteries, weigh less than their riders. Electric cars, in contrast, weigh many multiples as much as their drivers. Consequently, most of e-bikes’ battery charge can be spent moving the mass of the rider, but most of electric cars’ charge must be spent moving the bulk of the car itself. What’s more, part of e-bikes’ energy comes from leg muscles, again reducing the required battery power. In auto parlance, e-bikes have human-electric hybrid drives.

For these reasons, electric bikes are in the cat bird seat of electrified transportation at a time when many forces are aligned to speed electrification.

. . .

This alignment of interests (trend 3) coincides with rapid technical progress (trend 1) and huge economies of scale coming from China (trend 2). Together, surely these trends will push electric bikes into the mainstream of personal transportation, at least in good weather, at least in urban parts of the bike- and tech-loving Northwest.

Many observers think so. Many marketers think so. Big-box retailer Best Buy is confident enough that it has introduced e-bikes and other small electric vehicles to a Portland outlet in 2009 and is rolling them into more Northwest stores in 2010.

Maybe electric bikes are on the verge of breaking through in the Pacific Northwest, spreading contagiously as they have in China. But maybe they are not. Maybe the barriers to electric bikes are different in North America than in China or Europe. Whether or not you should buy one doesn’t depend on this question. But our public policies with regard to electric bikes, and perhaps with regard to other electric vehicles, depend on what’s blocking e-bikes in North America. If it’s just a matter of pushing them to a market tipping point, public subsidies can help—the subject of my next post.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this five-part series tomorrow.

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

Related Links:

Sanyo sets up solar parking lots for electric bikes

The parable of the electric bike

Hand-made electric cars serve a niche market in Japan

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Flynn, Scott Salyer's lead prosecutor, waits to talk with U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner earlier this month at the Sacramento federal courthouse. Prosecutors in the racketeering case have compiled more than 1 million documents.

Scott Salyer could have taken the easy way.

He could have lived off the interest from one of California's largest farm fortunes, whiling away the days pursuing his passions of dove hunting and Go Kart racing.

But that wasn't the Salyer way. Never has been.

Since his grandfather Clarence started the Salyer Land Co. in Corcoran back in the 1920s, ambition and conflict have marked the family history.

The Salyers survived water wars and labor strife. They fought with rival farmers, government agencies and among themselves. By the time Clarence "Cockeye" Salyer died in 1974, the family controlled 100,000 acres of California land.

And still that wasn't enough.

Maybe that is how Frederick Scott Salyer ended up in this mess, facing a possible 20 years in federal prison in what prosecutors describe as one of the most audacious food industry schemes ever, one apparently designed to corner the nation's market for processed tomato products.

The conspiracy drove up food prices for Americans nationwide who used certain ketchup, salsa, juice, paste and any of dozens of other tomato-based products, and introduced old and moldy tomatoes into grocery stores, prosecutors contend.

The government has more than half a dozen food industry executives lined up to testify against him to buttress its case.

Salyer, whose attorney declined to allow him to be interviewed, has pleaded not guilty and plans to fight the charges.

From the time he earned his agribusiness degree at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in 1979, Salyer has worked in family ventures, creating new companies, seeking out markets and building an international empire that, until its collapse last year, did more than $700 million in annual sales.

He took a farming operation that grew only cotton and safflower and expanded into lettuce and tomatoes, shaping it into one of the industry's largest producers.

Today, the 54-year-old Salyer sits in a seventh-floor cell at the Sacramento County Main Jail, denied bail because a federal magistrate judge has deemed him a flight risk.

A lifelong friend who wanted to hold up pictures in front of the visiting room glass so Salyer could get his first look at his newborn grandson said deputies would not allow it and Salyer's lawyer eventually had to get the photos to him.

"Scott's a tough guy, but he's had to really, really dig deep to hold up under this thing," said Bob Pruett, 53, a businessman and confidant who met Salyer 40 years ago on the Go Kart circuit.

"It's very difficult to see him in that situation."

People who have known him for decades say they cannot fathom how it came to this, how the ribald and sometimes racially charged conversations caught on electronic intercepts could have come from a man they say is generous to a fault and as down to earth as any of the farmworkers he employed.

"What he's being accused of and the Scott I know, that just doesn't square with me," Pruett said. "Just from a business perspective, it doesn't add up. So what's the rest of the story?"

Generous to charity, workers

The question has reverberated through the wealthy enclaves of the Monterey Peninsula since April 16, 2008, when more than 100 FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents raided Salyer's home and businesses as part of a probe begun in 2005.

Publicity about the investigation dried up customers and available credit. His SK Foods LP collapsed into bankruptcy last May, throwing people out of work and shocking residents of Carmel and Pebble Beach, where Salyer made his home and was known as a benefactor who gave millions to charity and hosted lavish parties for his employees.

Calvin Carter, a Morgan Hill electronics executive, said that when he met Salyer in college there was no clue to his background.

"For the longest time, I didn't know he was from one of the wealthiest farm families in California," said Carter, who remains a close friend of Salyer and his family. "You'd never know it."

His closest friends describe a man whose idea of the perfect meal is microwaving frozen White Castle burgers at midnight, or firing up a barbecue to grill chicken for friends – and for his cherished dog, Louis, who always, against all advice, got human cookies for dessert.

Salyer's gated estate sits atop a hill in Pebble Beach, where outsiders pay $9.25 simply for the privilege of driving along nearby 17-Mile Drive to take in the vistas and gaze at the mansions.

The 16-room cream-colored home, surrounded by tall oaks, has a view of the Pacific and, until recently, was on the market for $7 million.

Salyer is an avid dove hunter who had hunting and fishing licenses issued in Montana, Oregon and California. For 10 years straight, he flew friends on the family Sabreliner jet to the Indianapolis 500, where they were treated to exclusive access that placed them "on the grid" near the race cars when the engines were fired up.

Salyer, twice divorced, is fiercely protective of his two daughters, 28-year-old Stefanie and 20-year-old Caroline, and friends say he has been traveling the world in the last year on a quest for business opportunities that would salvage the family fortune, protect their futures and resurrect him as a viable entrepreneur.

His friends cite Salyer's devotion to his daughters and grandson as evidence he would never flee the country. But they concede close family ties have not always been the rule in a clan given to wrenching feuds.

Scott Salyer and his father, Fred, have not spoken in years, friends say, and at one point clashed in court, with the father accusing the son of misappropriating funds.

Scott Salyer idolized his grandfather Clarence, who was pushed out of the land company in his last years by sons Fred and Everette.

"I don't know, maybe that's a Salyer tradition," Pruett said. "Maybe they're too alike. Maybe that's part of where it comes from."

The roots of the family are laid out in "The King of California," a book published in 2003 by San Joaquin Valley historians Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman.

With no money and no assurance of a job, Cockeye Sal- yer came out of the Virginia hills in 1918 to the San Joaquin Valley, where he went to work as a mule skinner and rose to ranch superintendent.

He leased 800 acres for himself, launching what would become a seemingly unquenchable search for more land in the Valley's flat expanses. He had a mangled eye that wandered so far to the left that all you saw was white.

To sidestep inheritance taxes, he gave a majority of the stock in the Salyer Land Co. to his sons.

Later, they forced him out and he died a bitter man. Fred eventually discovered that Everette had stolen millions from the company, the authors wrote.

Everette died in 1982. Fred, now 86, still lives on the original homestead in Corcoran. His name is absent from the long list of people who have written to the court, urging his son's release.

100 hours of secret tapes

Even Scott's friends concede that defending the criminal case shapes up as a formidable task.

Federal prosecutors have compiled more than 1 million documents and 100 hours of recorded conversations caught on wiretaps and a body wire worn by a mole at SK Foods. To date, nine people – either Salyer employees or food company purchasing managers who say they were bribed – have pleaded guilty, and a 10th has agreed to. Seven of them are cooperating with the government.

Like coyotes around a campfire, agents and prosecutors circled Salyer for 4½ years. They contend they uncovered a massive, 10-year conspiracy hatched and carried out by the leadership of Monterey-based SK Foods.

Salyer is charged with a racketeering enterprise that bribed buyers at huge conglomerates such as Kraft Foods and Frito-Lay in order to eliminate competing bids and secure above-market prices for his company's products.

He is accused of passing off conventionally grown produce as organic, and of falsifying records and product labels to disguise the fact that produce was older than promised or contained such high levels of mold that it could not be legally sold in the United States.

Prosecutors say the conspirators sent millions of pounds of misbranded or moldy tomato paste into the national marketplace, including to Heinz USA, Tyson Foods Inc. and Gerber Products, the baby food maker.

The government maintains the overarching conspiracy did not cause health problems for those who bought products made with the paste. Prosecutors say, however, that the conspiracy hiked the average consumer's grocery bills.

Salyer's friends say they suspect he gave his business associates too much authority, and they attribute his troubles, at least in part, to Randall Lee Rahal, a beefy, 61-year-old food broker from New Jersey who worked for SK Foods and allegedly was on the company's board at one time.

Dynasty collapses

Rahal was the first to fall, pleading guilty in December 2008 to racketeering, money laundering, bid rigging and price fixing.

Like eight of the others charged in the case, Rahal remains free while the investigation continues, and court documents are filled with excerpts from recorded, sometimes-profane conversations between Salyer and Rahal, as they discussed whom to bribe and for how much.

Carter, Salyer's friend since college, occasionally would run into Rahal, and was uncomfortable around him.

"Rahal just seemed to be a little different," Carter said. "I guess you'd call it arrogance."

Rahal, Carter said, "was an intense individual – he just wasn't in line with the Salyer family I know."

Still, he said, "Scott would let him do what he wanted. Scott's management style was always positive, like, 'Let's do it.' "

The government charges that Salyer tried to disguise how close he was to Rahal. After Salyer learned Rahal had pleaded guilty and was helping the government, he ordered that minutes of a company board meeting be altered so as not to reflect Rahal's attendance, prosecutors allege.

Since the government probe became public, the Salyer family dynasty – built over three generations – has largely disintegrated into bankruptcy, antitrust and unfair competition civil lawsuits and the staggering array of criminal charges. SK Foods, with three plants in the Central Valley, was sold out of bankruptcy last year to a Singapore company for $39 million.

Lawyers on both sides say Salyer still has millions in various bank accounts and trusts, but there is no way to tell how much will be left when the smoke has cleared, and whether he will be free anytime soon to spend any of it.

Carter recalled Salyer coming to see him on Dec. 11, Salyer's 54th birthday, and the two going to lunch.

Salyer knew that a federal indictment was looming but was more interested in talking about the approaching birth of his grandchild.

"He was always working hard for his company, and was concerned for his employees, especially as all this unraveled," Carter said. "Scott didn't like to talk about these things.

"But you could see it in his face."

Scott Salyer, who enjoyed a life of great privilege and simple pleasures before he was jailed without bail this year and accused of racketeering and related charges, savors happier times in the yard of his Pebble Beach estate with Louis, his beloved cavalier king spaniel.

Randall Rahal, the food broker who worked for Salyer, pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities.

Scott Salyer, who enjoyed a life of great privilege and simple pleasures before he was jailed without bail this year and accused of racketeering and related charges, savors happier times in the yard of his Pebble Beach estate with Louis, his beloved cavalier king spaniel.

Scott Salyer could have taken the easy way.

He could have lived off the interest from one of California's largest farm fortunes, whiling away the days pursuing his passions of dove hunting and Go Kart racing.

But that wasn't the Salyer way. Never has been.

Since his grandfather Clarence started the Salyer Land Co. in Corcoran back in the 1920s, ambition and conflict have marked the family history.

The Salyers survived water wars and labor strife. They fought with rival farmers, government agencies and among themselves. By the time Clarence "Cockeye" Salyer died in 1974, the family controlled 100,000 acres of California land.

And still that wasn't enough.

Maybe that is how Frederick Scott Salyer ended up in this mess, facing a possible 20 years in federal prison in what prosecutors describe as one of the most audacious food industry schemes ever, one apparently designed to corner the nation's market for processed tomato products.

The conspiracy drove up food prices for Americans nationwide who used certain ketchup, salsa, juice, paste and any of dozens of other tomato-based products, and introduced old and moldy tomatoes into grocery stores, prosecutors contend.

The government has more than half a dozen food industry executives lined up to testify against him to buttress its case.

Salyer, whose attorney declined to allow him to be interviewed, has pleaded not guilty and plans to fight the charges.

From the time he earned his agribusiness degree at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in 1979, Salyer has worked in family ventures, creating new companies, seeking out markets and building an international empire that, until its collapse last year, did more than $700 million in annual sales.

He took a farming operation that grew only cotton and safflower and expanded into lettuce and tomatoes, shaping it into one of the industry's largest producers.

Today, the 54-year-old Salyer sits in a seventh-floor cell at the Sacramento County Main Jail, denied bail because a federal magistrate judge has deemed him a flight risk.

A lifelong friend who wanted to hold up pictures in front of the visiting room glass so Salyer could get his first look at his newborn grandson said deputies would not allow it and Salyer's lawyer eventually had to get the photos to him.

"Scott's a tough guy, but he's had to really, really dig deep to hold up under this thing," said Bob Pruett, 53, a businessman and confidant who met Salyer 40 years ago on the Go Kart circuit.

"It's very difficult to see him in that situation."

People who have known him for decades say they cannot fathom how it came to this, how the ribald and sometimes racially charged conversations caught on electronic intercepts could have come from a man they say is generous to a fault and as down to earth as any of the farmworkers he employed.

"What he's being accused of and the Scott I know, that just doesn't square with me," Pruett said. "Just from a business perspective, it doesn't add up. So what's the rest of the story?"

Generous to charity, workers

The question has reverberated through the wealthy enclaves of the Monterey Peninsula since April 16, 2008, when more than 100 FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents raided Salyer's home and businesses as part of a probe begun in 2005.

Publicity about the investigation dried up customers and available credit. His SK Foods LP collapsed into bankruptcy last May, throwing people out of work and shocking residents of Carmel and Pebble Beach, where Salyer made his home and was known as a benefactor who gave millions to charity and hosted lavish parties for his employees.

Calvin Carter, a Morgan Hill electronics executive, said that when he met Salyer in college there was no clue to his background.

"For the longest time, I didn't know he was from one of the wealthiest farm families in California," said Carter, who remains a close friend of Salyer and his family. "You'd never know it."

His closest friends describe a man whose idea of the perfect meal is microwaving frozen White Castle burgers at midnight, or firing up a barbecue to grill chicken for friends – and for his cherished dog, Louis, who always, against all advice, got human cookies for dessert.

Salyer's gated estate sits atop a hill in Pebble Beach, where outsiders pay $9.25 simply for the privilege of driving along nearby 17-Mile Drive to take in the vistas and gaze at the mansions.

The 16-room cream-colored home, surrounded by tall oaks, has a view of the Pacific and, until recently, was on the market for $7 million.

Salyer is an avid dove hunter who had hunting and fishing licenses issued in Montana, Oregon and California. For 10 years straight, he flew friends on the family Sabreliner jet to the Indianapolis 500, where they were treated to exclusive access that placed them "on the grid" near the race cars when the engines were fired up.

Salyer, twice divorced, is fiercely protective of his two daughters, 28-year-old Stefanie and 20-year-old Caroline, and friends say he has been traveling the world in the last year on a quest for business opportunities that would salvage the family fortune, protect their futures and resurrect him as a viable entrepreneur.

His friends cite Salyer's devotion to his daughters and grandson as evidence he would never flee the country. But they concede close family ties have not always been the rule in a clan given to wrenching feuds.

Scott Salyer and his father, Fred, have not spoken in years, friends say, and at one point clashed in court, with the father accusing the son of misappropriating funds.

Scott Salyer idolized his grandfather Clarence, who was pushed out of the land company in his last years by sons Fred and Everette.

"I don't know, maybe that's a Salyer tradition," Pruett said. "Maybe they're too alike. Maybe that's part of where it comes from."

The roots of the family are laid out in "The King of California," a book published in 2003 by San Joaquin Valley historians Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman.

With no money and no assurance of a job, Cockeye Sal- yer came out of the Virginia hills in 1918 to the San Joaquin Valley, where he went to work as a mule skinner and rose to ranch superintendent.

He leased 800 acres for himself, launching what would become a seemingly unquenchable search for more land in the Valley's flat expanses. He had a mangled eye that wandered so far to the left that all you saw was white.

To sidestep inheritance taxes, he gave a majority of the stock in the Salyer Land Co. to his sons.

Later, they forced him out and he died a bitter man. Fred eventually discovered that Everette had stolen millions from the company, the authors wrote.

Everette died in 1982. Fred, now 86, still lives on the original homestead in Corcoran. His name is absent from the long list of people who have written to the court, urging his son's release.

100 hours of secret tapes

Even Scott's friends concede that defending the criminal case shapes up as a formidable task.

Federal prosecutors have compiled more than 1 million documents and 100 hours of recorded conversations caught on wiretaps and a body wire worn by a mole at SK Foods. To date, nine people – either Salyer employees or food company purchasing managers who say they were bribed – have pleaded guilty, and a 10th has agreed to. Seven of them are cooperating with the government.

Like coyotes around a campfire, agents and prosecutors circled Salyer for 4½ years. They contend they uncovered a massive, 10-year conspiracy hatched and carried out by the leadership of Monterey-based SK Foods.

Salyer is charged with a racketeering enterprise that bribed buyers at huge conglomerates such as Kraft Foods and Frito-Lay in order to eliminate competing bids and secure above-market prices for his company's products.

He is accused of passing off conventionally grown produce as organic, and of falsifying records and product labels to disguise the fact that produce was older than promised or contained such high levels of mold that it could not be legally sold in the United States.

Prosecutors say the conspirators sent millions of pounds of misbranded or moldy tomato paste into the national marketplace, including to Heinz USA, Tyson Foods Inc. and Gerber Products, the baby food maker.

The government maintains the overarching conspiracy did not cause health problems for those who bought products made with the paste. Prosecutors say, however, that the conspiracy hiked the average consumer's grocery bills.

Salyer's friends say they suspect he gave his business associates too much authority, and they attribute his troubles, at least in part, to Randall Lee Rahal, a beefy, 61-year-old food broker from New Jersey who worked for SK Foods and allegedly was on the company's board at one time.

Dynasty collapses

Rahal was the first to fall, pleading guilty in December 2008 to racketeering, money laundering, bid rigging and price fixing.

Like eight of the others charged in the case, Rahal remains free while the investigation continues, and court documents are filled with excerpts from recorded, sometimes-profane conversations between Salyer and Rahal, as they discussed whom to bribe and for how much.

Carter, Salyer's friend since college, occasionally would run into Rahal, and was uncomfortable around him.

"Rahal just seemed to be a little different," Carter said. "I guess you'd call it arrogance."

Rahal, Carter said, "was an intense individual – he just wasn't in line with the Salyer family I know."

Still, he said, "Scott would let him do what he wanted. Scott's management style was always positive, like, 'Let's do it.' "

The government charges that Salyer tried to disguise how close he was to Rahal. After Salyer learned Rahal had pleaded guilty and was helping the government, he ordered that minutes of a company board meeting be altered so as not to reflect Rahal's attendance, prosecutors allege.

Since the government probe became public, the Salyer family dynasty – built over three generations – has largely disintegrated into bankruptcy, antitrust and unfair competition civil lawsuits and the staggering array of criminal charges. SK Foods, with three plants in the Central Valley, was sold out of bankruptcy last year to a Singapore company for $39 million.

Lawyers on both sides say Salyer still has millions in various bank accounts and trusts, but there is no way to tell how much will be left when the smoke has cleared, and whether he will be free anytime soon to spend any of it.

Carter recalled Salyer coming to see him on Dec. 11, Salyer's 54th birthday, and the two going to lunch.

Salyer knew that a federal indictment was looming but was more interested in talking about the approaching birth of his grandchild.

"He was always working hard for his company, and was concerned for his employees, especially as all this unraveled," Carter said. "Scott didn't like to talk about these things.

"But you could see it in his face."

Randall Rahal, the food broker who worked for Salyer, pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Flynn, Scott Salyer's lead prosecutor, waits to talk with U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner earlier this month at the Sacramento federal courthouse. Prosecutors in the racketeering case have compiled more than 1 million documents.

Scott Salyer, who enjoyed a life of great privilege and simple pleasures before he was jailed without bail this year and accused of racketeering and related charges, savors happier times in the yard of his Pebble Beach estate with Louis, his beloved cavalier king spaniel.

Scott Salyer could have taken the easy way.

He could have lived off the interest from one of California's largest farm fortunes, whiling away the days pursuing his passions of dove hunting and Go Kart racing.

But that wasn't the Salyer way. Never has been.

Since his grandfather Clarence started the Salyer Land Co. in Corcoran back in the 1920s, ambition and conflict have marked the family history.

The Salyers survived water wars and labor strife. They fought with rival farmers, government agencies and among themselves. By the time Clarence "Cockeye" Salyer died in 1974, the family controlled 100,000 acres of California land.

And still that wasn't enough.

Maybe that is how Frederick Scott Salyer ended up in this mess, facing a possible 20 years in federal prison in what prosecutors describe as one of the most audacious food industry schemes ever, one apparently designed to corner the nation's market for processed tomato products.

The conspiracy drove up food prices for Americans nationwide who used certain ketchup, salsa, juice, paste and any of dozens of other tomato-based products, and introduced old and moldy tomatoes into grocery stores, prosecutors contend.

The government has more than half a dozen food industry executives lined up to testify against him to buttress its case.

Salyer, whose attorney declined to allow him to be interviewed, has pleaded not guilty and plans to fight the charges.

From the time he earned his agribusiness degree at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in 1979, Salyer has worked in family ventures, creating new companies, seeking out markets and building an international empire that, until its collapse last year, did more than $700 million in annual sales.

He took a farming operation that grew only cotton and safflower and expanded into lettuce and tomatoes, shaping it into one of the industry's largest producers.

Today, the 54-year-old Salyer sits in a seventh-floor cell at the Sacramento County Main Jail, denied bail because a federal magistrate judge has deemed him a flight risk.

A lifelong friend who wanted to hold up pictures in front of the visiting room glass so Salyer could get his first look at his newborn grandson said deputies would not allow it and Salyer's lawyer eventually had to get the photos to him.

"Scott's a tough guy, but he's had to really, really dig deep to hold up under this thing," said Bob Pruett, 53, a businessman and confidant who met Salyer 40 years ago on the Go Kart circuit.

"It's very difficult to see him in that situation."

People who have known him for decades say they cannot fathom how it came to this, how the ribald and sometimes racially charged conversations caught on electronic intercepts could have come from a man they say is generous to a fault and as down to earth as any of the farmworkers he employed.

"What he's being accused of and the Scott I know, that just doesn't square with me," Pruett said. "Just from a business perspective, it doesn't add up. So what's the rest of the story?"

Generous to charity, workers

The question has reverberated through the wealthy enclaves of the Monterey Peninsula since April 16, 2008, when more than 100 FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents raided Salyer's home and businesses as part of a probe begun in 2005.

Publicity about the investigation dried up customers and available credit. His SK Foods LP collapsed into bankruptcy last May, throwing people out of work and shocking residents of Carmel and Pebble Beach, where Salyer made his home and was known as a benefactor who gave millions to charity and hosted lavish parties for his employees.

Calvin Carter, a Morgan Hill electronics executive, said that when he met Salyer in college there was no clue to his background.

"For the longest time, I didn't know he was from one of the wealthiest farm families in California," said Carter, who remains a close friend of Salyer and his family. "You'd never know it."

His closest friends describe a man whose idea of the perfect meal is microwaving frozen White Castle burgers at midnight, or firing up a barbecue to grill chicken for friends – and for his cherished dog, Louis, who always, against all advice, got human cookies for dessert.

Salyer's gated estate sits atop a hill in Pebble Beach, where outsiders pay $9.25 simply for the privilege of driving along nearby 17-Mile Drive to take in the vistas and gaze at the mansions.

The 16-room cream-colored home, surrounded by tall oaks, has a view of the Pacific and, until recently, was on the market for $7 million.

Salyer is an avid dove hunter who had hunting and fishing licenses issued in Montana, Oregon and California. For 10 years straight, he flew friends on the family Sabreliner jet to the Indianapolis 500, where they were treated to exclusive access that placed them "on the grid" near the race cars when the engines were fired up.

Salyer, twice divorced, is fiercely protective of his two daughters, 28-year-old Stefanie and 20-year-old Caroline, and friends say he has been traveling the world in the last year on a quest for business opportunities that would salvage the family fortune, protect their futures and resurrect him as a viable entrepreneur.

His friends cite Salyer's devotion to his daughters and grandson as evidence he would never flee the country. But they concede close family ties have not always been the rule in a clan given to wrenching feuds.

Scott Salyer and his father, Fred, have not spoken in years, friends say, and at one point clashed in court, with the father accusing the son of misappropriating funds.

Scott Salyer idolized his grandfather Clarence, who was pushed out of the land company in his last years by sons Fred and Everette.

"I don't know, maybe that's a Salyer tradition," Pruett said. "Maybe they're too alike. Maybe that's part of where it comes from."

The roots of the family are laid out in "The King of California," a book published in 2003 by San Joaquin Valley historians Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman.

With no money and no assurance of a job, Cockeye Sal- yer came out of the Virginia hills in 1918 to the San Joaquin Valley, where he went to work as a mule skinner and rose to ranch superintendent.

He leased 800 acres for himself, launching what would become a seemingly unquenchable search for more land in the Valley's flat expanses. He had a mangled eye that wandered so far to the left that all you saw was white.

To sidestep inheritance taxes, he gave a majority of the stock in the Salyer Land Co. to his sons.

Later, they forced him out and he died a bitter man. Fred eventually discovered that Everette had stolen millions from the company, the authors wrote.

Everette died in 1982. Fred, now 86, still lives on the original homestead in Corcoran. His name is absent from the long list of people who have written to the court, urging his son's release.

100 hours of secret tapes

Even Scott's friends concede that defending the criminal case shapes up as a formidable task.

Federal prosecutors have compiled more than 1 million documents and 100 hours of recorded conversations caught on wiretaps and a body wire worn by a mole at SK Foods. To date, nine people – either Salyer employees or food company purchasing managers who say they were bribed – have pleaded guilty, and a 10th has agreed to. Seven of them are cooperating with the government.

Like coyotes around a campfire, agents and prosecutors circled Salyer for 4½ years. They contend they uncovered a massive, 10-year conspiracy hatched and carried out by the leadership of Monterey-based SK Foods.

Salyer is charged with a racketeering enterprise that bribed buyers at huge conglomerates such as Kraft Foods and Frito-Lay in order to eliminate competing bids and secure above-market prices for his company's products.

He is accused of passing off conventionally grown produce as organic, and of falsifying records and product labels to disguise the fact that produce was older than promised or contained such high levels of mold that it could not be legally sold in the United States.

Prosecutors say the conspirators sent millions of pounds of misbranded or moldy tomato paste into the national marketplace, including to Heinz USA, Tyson Foods Inc. and Gerber Products, the baby food maker.

The government maintains the overarching conspiracy did not cause health problems for those who bought products made with the paste. Prosecutors say, however, that the conspiracy hiked the average consumer's grocery bills.

Salyer's friends say they suspect he gave his business associates too much authority, and they attribute his troubles, at least in part, to Randall Lee Rahal, a beefy, 61-year-old food broker from New Jersey who worked for SK Foods and allegedly was on the company's board at one time.

Dynasty collapses

Rahal was the first to fall, pleading guilty in December 2008 to racketeering, money laundering, bid rigging and price fixing.

Like eight of the others charged in the case, Rahal remains free while the investigation continues, and court documents are filled with excerpts from recorded, sometimes-profane conversations between Salyer and Rahal, as they discussed whom to bribe and for how much.

Carter, Salyer's friend since college, occasionally would run into Rahal, and was uncomfortable around him.

"Rahal just seemed to be a little different," Carter said. "I guess you'd call it arrogance."

Rahal, Carter said, "was an intense individual – he just wasn't in line with the Salyer family I know."

Still, he said, "Scott would let him do what he wanted. Scott's management style was always positive, like, 'Let's do it.' "

The government charges that Salyer tried to disguise how close he was to Rahal. After Salyer learned Rahal had pleaded guilty and was helping the government, he ordered that minutes of a company board meeting be altered so as not to reflect Rahal's attendance, prosecutors allege.

Since the government probe became public, the Salyer family dynasty – built over three generations – has largely disintegrated into bankruptcy, antitrust and unfair competition civil lawsuits and the staggering array of criminal charges. SK Foods, with three plants in the Central Valley, was sold out of bankruptcy last year to a Singapore company for $39 million.

Lawyers on both sides say Salyer still has millions in various bank accounts and trusts, but there is no way to tell how much will be left when the smoke has cleared, and whether he will be free anytime soon to spend any of it.

Carter recalled Salyer coming to see him on Dec. 11, Salyer's 54th birthday, and the two going to lunch.

Salyer knew that a federal indictment was looming but was more interested in talking about the approaching birth of his grandchild.

"He was always working hard for his company, and was concerned for his employees, especially as all this unraveled," Carter said. "Scott didn't like to talk about these things.

"But you could see it in his face."

Randall Rahal, the food broker who worked for Salyer, pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Flynn, Scott Salyer's lead prosecutor, waits to talk with U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner earlier this month at the Sacramento federal courthouse. Prosecutors in the racketeering case have compiled more than 1 million documents.

Scott Salyer, who enjoyed a life of great privilege and simple pleasures before he was jailed without bail this year and accused of racketeering and related charges, savors happier times in the yard of his Pebble Beach estate with Louis, his beloved cavalier king spaniel.

Scott Salyer could have taken the easy way.

He could have lived off the interest from one of California's largest farm fortunes, whiling away the days pursuing his passions of dove hunting and Go Kart racing.

But that wasn't the Salyer way. Never has been.

Since his grandfather Clarence started the Salyer Land Co. in Corcoran back in the 1920s, ambition and conflict have marked the family history.

The Salyers survived water wars and labor strife. They fought with rival farmers, government agencies and among themselves. By the time Clarence "Cockeye" Salyer died in 1974, the family controlled 100,000 acres of California land.

And still that wasn't enough.

Maybe that is how Frederick Scott Salyer ended up in this mess, facing a possible 20 years in federal prison in what prosecutors describe as one of the most audacious food industry schemes ever, one apparently designed to corner the nation's market for processed tomato products.

The conspiracy drove up food prices for Americans nationwide who used certain ketchup, salsa, juice, paste and any of dozens of other tomato-based products, and introduced old and moldy tomatoes into grocery stores, prosecutors contend.

The government has more than half a dozen food industry executives lined up to testify against him to buttress its case.

Salyer, whose attorney declined to allow him to be interviewed, has pleaded not guilty and plans to fight the charges.

From the time he earned his agribusiness degree at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in 1979, Salyer has worked in family ventures, creating new companies, seeking out markets and building an international empire that, until its collapse last year, did more than $700 million in annual sales.

He took a farming operation that grew only cotton and safflower and expanded into lettuce and tomatoes, shaping it into one of the industry's largest producers.

Today, the 54-year-old Salyer sits in a seventh-floor cell at the Sacramento County Main Jail, denied bail because a federal magistrate judge has deemed him a flight risk.

A lifelong friend who wanted to hold up pictures in front of the visiting room glass so Salyer could get his first look at his newborn grandson said deputies would not allow it and Salyer's lawyer eventually had to get the photos to him.

"Scott's a tough guy, but he's had to really, really dig deep to hold up under this thing," said Bob Pruett, 53, a businessman and confidant who met Salyer 40 years ago on the Go Kart circuit.

"It's very difficult to see him in that situation."

People who have known him for decades say they cannot fathom how it came to this, how the ribald and sometimes racially charged conversations caught on electronic intercepts could have come from a man they say is generous to a fault and as down to earth as any of the farmworkers he employed.

"What he's being accused of and the Scott I know, that just doesn't square with me," Pruett said. "Just from a business perspective, it doesn't add up. So what's the rest of the story?"

Generous to charity, workers

The question has reverberated through the wealthy enclaves of the Monterey Peninsula since April 16, 2008, when more than 100 FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents raided Salyer's home and businesses as part of a probe begun in 2005.

Publicity about the investigation dried up customers and available credit. His SK Foods LP collapsed into bankruptcy last May, throwing people out of work and shocking residents of Carmel and Pebble Beach, where Salyer made his home and was known as a benefactor who gave millions to charity and hosted lavish parties for his employees.

Calvin Carter, a Morgan Hill electronics executive, said that when he met Salyer in college there was no clue to his background.

"For the longest time, I didn't know he was from one of the wealthiest farm families in California," said Carter, who remains a close friend of Salyer and his family. "You'd never know it."

His closest friends describe a man whose idea of the perfect meal is microwaving frozen White Castle burgers at midnight, or firing up a barbecue to grill chicken for friends – and for his cherished dog, Louis, who always, against all advice, got human cookies for dessert.

Salyer's gated estate sits atop a hill in Pebble Beach, where outsiders pay $9.25 simply for the privilege of driving along nearby 17-Mile Drive to take in the vistas and gaze at the mansions.

The 16-room cream-colored home, surrounded by tall oaks, has a view of the Pacific and, until recently, was on the market for $7 million.

Salyer is an avid dove hunter who had hunting and fishing licenses issued in Montana, Oregon and California. For 10 years straight, he flew friends on the family Sabreliner jet to the Indianapolis 500, where they were treated to exclusive access that placed them "on the grid" near the race cars when the engines were fired up.

Salyer, twice divorced, is fiercely protective of his two daughters, 28-year-old Stefanie and 20-year-old Caroline, and friends say he has been traveling the world in the last year on a quest for business opportunities that would salvage the family fortune, protect their futures and resurrect him as a viable entrepreneur.

His friends cite Salyer's devotion to his daughters and grandson as evidence he would never flee the country. But they concede close family ties have not always been the rule in a clan given to wrenching feuds.

Scott Salyer and his father, Fred, have not spoken in years, friends say, and at one point clashed in court, with the father accusing the son of misappropriating funds.

Scott Salyer idolized his grandfather Clarence, who was pushed out of the land company in his last years by sons Fred and Everette.

"I don't know, maybe that's a Salyer tradition," Pruett said. "Maybe they're too alike. Maybe that's part of where it comes from."

The roots of the family are laid out in "The King of California," a book published in 2003 by San Joaquin Valley historians Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman.

With no money and no assurance of a job, Cockeye Sal- yer came out of the Virginia hills in 1918 to the San Joaquin Valley, where he went to work as a mule skinner and rose to ranch superintendent.

He leased 800 acres for himself, launching what would become a seemingly unquenchable search for more land in the Valley's flat expanses. He had a mangled eye that wandered so far to the left that all you saw was white.

To sidestep inheritance taxes, he gave a majority of the stock in the Salyer Land Co. to his sons.

Later, they forced him out and he died a bitter man. Fred eventually discovered that Everette had stolen millions from the company, the authors wrote.

Everette died in 1982. Fred, now 86, still lives on the original homestead in Corcoran. His name is absent from the long list of people who have written to the court, urging his son's release.

100 hours of secret tapes

Even Scott's friends concede that defending the criminal case shapes up as a formidable task.

Federal prosecutors have compiled more than 1 million documents and 100 hours of recorded conversations caught on wiretaps and a body wire worn by a mole at SK Foods. To date, nine people – either Salyer employees or food company purchasing managers who say they were bribed – have pleaded guilty, and a 10th has agreed to. Seven of them are cooperating with the government.

Like coyotes around a campfire, agents and prosecutors circled Salyer for 4½ years. They contend they uncovered a massive, 10-year conspiracy hatched and carried out by the leadership of Monterey-based SK Foods.

Salyer is charged with a racketeering enterprise that bribed buyers at huge conglomerates such as Kraft Foods and Frito-Lay in order to eliminate competing bids and secure above-market prices for his company's products.

He is accused of passing off conventionally grown produce as organic, and of falsifying records and product labels to disguise the fact that produce was older than promised or contained such high levels of mold that it could not be legally sold in the United States.

Prosecutors say the conspirators sent millions of pounds of misbranded or moldy tomato paste into the national marketplace, including to Heinz USA, Tyson Foods Inc. and Gerber Products, the baby food maker.

The government maintains the overarching conspiracy did not cause health problems for those who bought products made with the paste. Prosecutors say, however, that the conspiracy hiked the average consumer's grocery bills.

Salyer's friends say they suspect he gave his business associates too much authority, and they attribute his troubles, at least in part, to Randall Lee Rahal, a beefy, 61-year-old food broker from New Jersey who worked for SK Foods and allegedly was on the company's board at one time.

Dynasty collapses

Rahal was the first to fall, pleading guilty in December 2008 to racketeering, money laundering, bid rigging and price fixing.

Like eight of the others charged in the case, Rahal remains free while the investigation continues, and court documents are filled with excerpts from recorded, sometimes-profane conversations between Salyer and Rahal, as they discussed whom to bribe and for how much.

Carter, Salyer's friend since college, occasionally would run into Rahal, and was uncomfortable around him.

"Rahal just seemed to be a little different," Carter said. "I guess you'd call it arrogance."

Rahal, Carter said, "was an intense individual – he just wasn't in line with the Salyer family I know."

Still, he said, "Scott would let him do what he wanted. Scott's management style was always positive, like, 'Let's do it.' "

The government charges that Salyer tried to disguise how close he was to Rahal. After Salyer learned Rahal had pleaded guilty and was helping the government, he ordered that minutes of a company board meeting be altered so as not to reflect Rahal's attendance, prosecutors allege.

Since the government probe became public, the Salyer family dynasty – built over three generations – has largely disintegrated into bankruptcy, antitrust and unfair competition civil lawsuits and the staggering array of criminal charges. SK Foods, with three plants in the Central Valley, was sold out of bankruptcy last year to a Singapore company for $39 million.

Lawyers on both sides say Salyer still has millions in various bank accounts and trusts, but there is no way to tell how much will be left when the smoke has cleared, and whether he will be free anytime soon to spend any of it.

Carter recalled Salyer coming to see him on Dec. 11, Salyer's 54th birthday, and the two going to lunch.

Salyer knew that a federal indictment was looming but was more interested in talking about the approaching birth of his grandchild.

"He was always working hard for his company, and was concerned for his employees, especially as all this unraveled," Carter said. "Scott didn't like to talk about these things.

"But you could see it in his face."

Randall Rahal, the food broker who worked for Salyer, pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Flynn, Scott Salyer's lead prosecutor, waits to talk with U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner earlier this month at the Sacramento federal courthouse. Prosecutors in the racketeering case have compiled more than 1 million documents.

Scott Salyer, who enjoyed a life of great privilege and simple pleasures before he was jailed without bail this year and accused of racketeering and related charges, savors happier times in the yard of his Pebble Beach estate with Louis, his beloved cavalier king spaniel.

Scott Salyer could have taken the easy way.

He could have lived off the interest from one of California's largest farm fortunes, whiling away the days pursuing his passions of dove hunting and Go Kart racing.

But that wasn't the Salyer way. Never has been.

Since his grandfather Clarence started the Salyer Land Co. in Corcoran back in the 1920s, ambition and conflict have marked the family history.

The Salyers survived water wars and labor strife. They fought with rival farmers, government agencies and among themselves. By the time Clarence "Cockeye" Salyer died in 1974, the family controlled 100,000 acres of California land.

And still that wasn't enough.

Maybe that is how Frederick Scott Salyer ended up in this mess, facing a possible 20 years in federal prison in what prosecutors describe as one of the most audacious food industry schemes ever, one apparently designed to corner the nation's market for processed tomato products.

The conspiracy drove up food prices for Americans nationwide who used certain ketchup, salsa, juice, paste and any of dozens of other tomato-based products, and introduced old and moldy tomatoes into grocery stores, prosecutors contend.

The government has more than half a dozen food industry executives lined up to testify against him to buttress its case.

Salyer, whose attorney declined to allow him to be interviewed, has pleaded not guilty and plans to fight the charges.

From the time he earned his agribusiness degree at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in 1979, Salyer has worked in family ventures, creating new companies, seeking out markets and building an international empire that, until its collapse last year, did more than $700 million in annual sales.

He took a farming operation that grew only cotton and safflower and expanded into lettuce and tomatoes, shaping it into one of the industry's largest producers.

Today, the 54-year-old Salyer sits in a seventh-floor cell at the Sacramento County Main Jail, denied bail because a federal magistrate judge has deemed him a flight risk.

A lifelong friend who wanted to hold up pictures in front of the visiting room glass so Salyer could get his first look at his newborn grandson said deputies would not allow it and Salyer's lawyer eventually had to get the photos to him.

"Scott's a tough guy, but he's had to really, really dig deep to hold up under this thing," said Bob Pruett, 53, a businessman and confidant who met Salyer 40 years ago on the Go Kart circuit.

"It's very difficult to see him in that situation."

People who have known him for decades say they cannot fathom how it came to this, how the ribald and sometimes racially charged conversations caught on electronic intercepts could have come from a man they say is generous to a fault and as down to earth as any of the farmworkers he employed.

"What he's being accused of and the Scott I know, that just doesn't square with me," Pruett said. "Just from a business perspective, it doesn't add up. So what's the rest of the story?"

Generous to charity, workers

The question has reverberated through the wealthy enclaves of the Monterey Peninsula since April 16, 2008, when more than 100 FBI and Internal Revenue Service agents raided Salyer's home and businesses as part of a probe begun in 2005.

Publicity about the investigation dried up customers and available credit. His SK Foods LP collapsed into bankruptcy last May, throwing people out of work and shocking residents of Carmel and Pebble Beach, where Salyer made his home and was known as a benefactor who gave millions to charity and hosted lavish parties for his employees.

Calvin Carter, a Morgan Hill electronics executive, said that when he met Salyer in college there was no clue to his background.

"For the longest time, I didn't know he was from one of the wealthiest farm families in California," said Carter, who remains a close friend of Salyer and his family. "You'd never know it."

His closest friends describe a man whose idea of the perfect meal is microwaving frozen White Castle burgers at midnight, or firing up a barbecue to grill chicken for friends – and for his cherished dog, Louis, who always, against all advice, got human cookies for dessert.

Salyer's gated estate sits atop a hill in Pebble Beach, where outsiders pay $9.25 simply for the privilege of driving along nearby 17-Mile Drive to take in the vistas and gaze at the mansions.

The 16-room cream-colored home, surrounded by tall oaks, has a view of the Pacific and, until recently, was on the market for $7 million.

Salyer is an avid dove hunter who had hunting and fishing licenses issued in Montana, Oregon and California. For 10 years straight, he flew friends on the family Sabreliner jet to the Indianapolis 500, where they were treated to exclusive access that placed them "on the grid" near the race cars when the engines were fired up.

Salyer, twice divorced, is fiercely protective of his two daughters, 28-year-old Stefanie and 20-year-old Caroline, and friends say he has been traveling the world in the last year on a quest for business opportunities that would salvage the family fortune, protect their futures and resurrect him as a viable entrepreneur.

His friends cite Salyer's devotion to his daughters and grandson as evidence he would never flee the country. But they concede close family ties have not always been the rule in a clan given to wrenching feuds.

Scott Salyer and his father, Fred, have not spoken in years, friends say, and at one point clashed in court, with the father accusing the son of misappropriating funds.

Scott Salyer idolized his grandfather Clarence, who was pushed out of the land company in his last years by sons Fred and Everette.

"I don't know, maybe that's a Salyer tradition," Pruett said. "Maybe they're too alike. Maybe that's part of where it comes from."

The roots of the family are laid out in "The King of California," a book published in 2003 by San Joaquin Valley historians Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman.

With no money and no assurance of a job, Cockeye Sal- yer came out of the Virginia hills in 1918 to the San Joaquin Valley, where he went to work as a mule skinner and rose to ranch superintendent.

He leased 800 acres for himself, launching what would become a seemingly unquenchable search for more land in the Valley's flat expanses. He had a mangled eye that wandered so far to the left that all you saw was white.

To sidestep inheritance taxes, he gave a majority of the stock in the Salyer Land Co. to his sons.

Later, they forced him out and he died a bitter man. Fred eventually discovered that Everette had stolen millions from the company, the authors wrote.

Everette died in 1982. Fred, now 86, still lives on the original homestead in Corcoran. His name is absent from the long list of people who have written to the court, urging his son's release.

100 hours of secret tapes

Even Scott's friends concede that defending the criminal case shapes up as a formidable task.

Federal prosecutors have compiled more than 1 million documents and 100 hours of recorded conversations caught on wiretaps and a body wire worn by a mole at SK Foods. To date, nine people – either Salyer employees or food company purchasing managers who say they were bribed – have pleaded guilty, and a 10th has agreed to. Seven of them are cooperating with the government.

Like coyotes around a campfire, agents and prosecutors circled Salyer for 4½ years. They contend they uncovered a massive, 10-year conspiracy hatched and carried out by the leadership of Monterey-based SK Foods.

Salyer is charged with a racketeering enterprise that bribed buyers at huge conglomerates such as Kraft Foods and Frito-Lay in order to eliminate competing bids and secure above-market prices for his company's products.

He is accused of passing off conventionally grown produce as organic, and of falsifying records and product labels to disguise the fact that produce was older than promised or contained such high levels of mold that it could not be legally sold in the United States.

Prosecutors say the conspirators sent millions of pounds of misbranded or moldy tomato paste into the national marketplace, including to Heinz USA, Tyson Foods Inc. and Gerber Products, the baby food maker.

The government maintains the overarching conspiracy did not cause health problems for those who bought products made with the paste. Prosecutors say, however, that the conspiracy hiked the average consumer's grocery bills.

Salyer's friends say they suspect he gave his business associates too much authority, and they attribute his troubles, at least in part, to Randall Lee Rahal, a beefy, 61-year-old food broker from New Jersey who worked for SK Foods and allegedly was on the company's board at one time.

Dynasty collapses

Rahal was the first to fall, pleading guilty in December 2008 to racketeering, money laundering, bid rigging and price fixing.

Like eight of the others charged in the case, Rahal remains free while the investigation continues, and court documents are filled with excerpts from recorded, sometimes-profane conversations between Salyer and Rahal, as they discussed whom to bribe and for how much.

Carter, Salyer's friend since college, occasionally would run into Rahal, and was uncomfortable around him.

"Rahal just seemed to be a little different," Carter said. "I guess you'd call it arrogance."

Rahal, Carter said, "was an intense individual – he just wasn't in line with the Salyer family I know."

Still, he said, "Scott would let him do what he wanted. Scott's management style was always positive, like, 'Let's do it.' "

The government charges that Salyer tried to disguise how close he was to Rahal. After Salyer learned Rahal had pleaded guilty and was helping the government, he ordered that minutes of a company board meeting be altered so as not to reflect Rahal's attendance, prosecutors allege.

Since the government probe became public, the Salyer family dynasty – built over three generations – has largely disintegrated into bankruptcy, antitrust and unfair competition civil lawsuits and the staggering array of criminal charges. SK Foods, with three plants in the Central Valley, was sold out of bankruptcy last year to a Singapore company for $39 million.

Lawyers on both sides say Salyer still has millions in various bank accounts and trusts, but there is no way to tell how much will be left when the smoke has cleared, and whether he will be free anytime soon to spend any of it.

Carter recalled Salyer coming to see him on Dec. 11, Salyer's 54th birthday, and the two going to lunch.

Salyer knew that a federal indictment was looming but was more interested in talking about the approaching birth of his grandchild.

"He was always working hard for his company, and was concerned for his employees, especially as all this unraveled," Carter said. "Scott didn't like to talk about these things.

"But you could see it in his face."

Randall Rahal, the food broker who worked for Salyer, pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Flynn, Scott Salyer's lead prosecutor, waits to talk with U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner earlier this month at the Sacramento federal courthouse. Prosecutors in the racketeering case have compiled more than 1 million documents.

A group of local environmental organizations issued a letter today critical of the response from Governors Kulongoski and Gregoire to the request of local leaders to have more control of the Columbia River Crossing project:

March 10, 2010

Dear Governors Gregoire and Kulongoski,

We are writing on behalf of our organizations, which together represent thousands of Oregonians and Washingtonians, to express our concern about the Columbia River Crossing project. In particular, we are concerned about your response to a recent request made by Portland Mayor Sam Adams, Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt, Metro Council President David Bragdon, and Clark County Commissioner Steve Stuart that seeks to address serious flaws in the current plan.

We are confident that, as the governors of Oregon and Washington, you support the region's shared values of economic vitality, reliable and equitable transportation, safe and healthy neighborhoods, good air quality, reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and good public process. Yet we agree with our local officials that the current proposal for the I-5 corridor falls short on these measures.

We are concerned that the project will lead to increased traffic and congestion, exacerbate the current bottlenecks in the Rose Quarter, on I-205, and on local streets in Portland, induce poorly planned sprawl development, and increase greenhouse gas emissions, making it much more difficult to reach the greenhouse gas goals and requirements you each supported. We also believe the project should increase transparency and provide affected communities with better opportunities to meaningfully participate in the process.

The local officials made several specific requests to address serious flaws in the current plan. The expert review panel you proposed in response is inadequate because it does not allow for consideration of the issues they raised. First, the scope of the review fails to address key questions, particularly related to maximizing performance in the corridor, bringing down project cost, protecting funding for other transportation needs, and evaluating key assumptions that resulted in excessive community impacts, including on Hayden Island. Second, the rigid, fast-track timeline does not allow the opportunity to address any problems the panel may find.

The local officials ask important questions about the project and we ask that you reconsider your response. It is worth some extra time in planning to ensure that this multi-billion dollar, region reshaping, project is done right.

Sincerely,

Jill Fuglister, Co-Director
Coalition for a Livable Future

Rob Johnson, Executive Director
Transportation Choices Coalition

Mary Kyle McCurdy, Co-Interim Director
1000 Friends of Oregon

Jim Long, President
AORTA (Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates)

Gerik Kransky, Advocacy Campaign Manager
Bicycle Transportation Alliance

Chuck Ayers, Executive Director
Cascade Bicycle Club

Gregg Small, Executive Director
Climate Solutions

Brett VandenHeuvel, Executive Director
Columbia Riverkeeper

Mary Lou Hennrich, Executive Director
Community Health Partnership: Oregon's Public Health Institute

Brock Howell, Advocate
Environment Oregon

April Putney, Co-Director
Futurewise

Jon Ostar, Co-Director
OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon

Mel Rader, Co-Director
Upstream Public Health

Blair Anundson, Consumer and Democracy Advocate
WashPIRG

Leslie Leong, center, and her Kennedy High School teammates celebrate a Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal win over McClatchy on Wednesday night in Stockton.

The McClatchy Lions and Kennedy Cougars have tussled for decades, their prep rivalry among the most ferocious in the region. Yet sometimes – especially within Sacramento's Asian American community during tournament time – the dynamics become confusing, confounding, overwhelming.

Imagine cheering against your sister or your son? Shoving an elbow into the abdomen of a best friend? Marrying someone whose letter jacket is McClatchy red when yours is Kennedy green?

"I'm still a Cougar," insisted Julie Ota, a former All-City player at Kennedy. "My husband was All-City at McClatchy and now coaches at McClatchy. And our daughter plays for McClatchy. So as you can imagine, we have some pretty interesting conversations."

What makes this rivalry between schools five miles apart so uniquely fascinating is that its fan base encompasses much of the region's Asian community and, in some respects, traces back to the early 1940s, when an estimated 120,000 residents of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps.

Baseball was far more popular among Asians before World War II, but basketball leagues featuring males and females flourished in the camps. When the final camp closed in 1946 and the Japanese were relocated, they formed leagues throughout the country, with basketball a primary means of furthering traditions and securing cultural and social bonds among families.

"When we relocated, we had to form our own leagues because of segregation," recalled Tsuto Ota, 83, the family patriarch and a native Sacramentan who spent four years at Tule Lake. "We couldn't even join the American Bowling Congress, so we started our own bowling leagues, too.

"At some point, we became more assimilated, and while some still played baseball, basketball became more and more popular among younger generations."

Girls game on the rise

Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation officials estimate 850 to 1,000 area youngsters – many as young as 5 or 6 – compete in Asian church or instructional leagues, or play for club teams and Amateur Athletic Union squads. The number of participants is estimated at more than 10,000 in Southern California and several thousand in the Bay Area.

The advantages of competing extensively in organized basketball programs has benefited the area's boys prep teams for years, but lately, the girls are the ones moving up the rankings, storming the court and packing the stands.

When the Kennedy and McClatchy girls teams were ranked Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, their Jan. 23 meeting at McClatchy's main gym attracted a raucous, sold-out crowd. Another 50 or so partisans – relatives, friends, friends of friends – had to peer through the narrow windows from outside.

The scene inside was a vivid spectacle of sports and community, and except for the sellout part, was repeated Wednesday night, when the teams met in a California Interscholastic Federation Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal at the much larger Pacific facility in Stockton.

The Legion of Lions fan club members occupied sections of bleachers and stood throughout. They painted assorted body parts red, their voices raised to heckle the Cougars and applaud McClatchy. Across the court, members of Kennedy's Green Scream Machine maintained an equally vocal and colorful presence.

"The kids play on other teams at other times of the year, but the epicenter is Kennedy and McClatchy," said Rod Kunisaki, former president of the Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation and father of former Lions star and current assistant Jessica Kunisaki.

"When Jessica lost to Kennedy, some of those other kids were my cousins. But I would tell them: 'You can't come over to the house for three days. (Laugh) Don't even knock on the door.' "

Take a closer look, though, and the audience reflects basketball's increasing significance within the Asian community, with almost everyone related or connected to someone favoring the opponent's color; after awhile, the colors begin to blur.

"Some of us have been playing together since we were in middle school," said Kennedy forward Leslie Leong, "and our parents and grandparents are good friends. And while we're competitive, one of the best things about playing are the socials and the dances afterward.

"I don't want to say basketball is our life, but it's a very big part of our life from the time we're little kids."

Friends become family

When teary Lions senior Tricia Ota limped off the court Wednesday night, her left leg protected by a balky brace, she was embraced by several of her opponents. Having overcome multiple knee surgeries since her freshman season, she rejoined the team only weeks ago to put a glossier finish on her basketball experience and give a close friend a fond farewell.

"When we won the section title three years ago," said Ota, "that was the best moment of my life. I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this.

"It's not just a sport. Ariel and I have been together since freshman year, and she has been so supportive of me through everything. She has become one of my best friends. We're so appreciative that she stayed at McClatchy."

Ariel, of course, is the highly recruited Ariel Thomas, a Bee Player of the Year candidate and future member of Paul Westhead's squad at Oregon. Thomas, who is African American, is everything most of the current Lions are not: quick and athletic, tall enough to excel at the next level, and owner of a major college basketball scholarship.

One of the issues confronting the McClatchy girls team is increasingly common to the boys – Thomas routinely was approached and urged to transfer to a more dominant program such as Sacramento High School or Kennedy.

"We don't have a lot of post players," joked Lions coach Harvey Tahara, who enjoyed previous success coaching the boys. "If we've got a kid who is 5-5 or 5-6, they're automatically in the post. That's probably why the girls have become more dominant.

"Size is more of a factor for boys at the high school level. But we were able to build around Ariel, and the fact she stayed says a lot about her loyalty."

Thomas resisted pressure to transfer from her father, among others. Despite occasional frustrations, she has no regrets.

"Most of the teams we play against are taller," she said, "and other players look down on you, like, 'Wow, your team is so short.'

"But we maximize our strengths, which is a great coach, fundamentals and teamwork. We try to run them (foes) out of the gym. Plus, these are my close friends. McClatchy has become a family to me."

Blurring the lines

The thorniest issue facing the Asian leagues involves the very definition of family, or ethnicity. Through the years, leagues originally restricted to Japanese expanded to include other Asians. As intermarriage and assimilation persists, this has led to other questions regarding ethnicity and eligibility.

"If you look at most of the leagues," said Christina Chin, a UC Davis graduate and UCLA doctoral student who has written about basketball's influence on the Asian community, "the numbers vary a lot. It's very informal. What percentage of you has to be Asian to compete? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

"These leagues were started because of segregation, so Japanese Americans had their own space and could preserve their culture. But in my research, what I have found is that the rules are changing. The older folks want to keep it the way it was, but the kids say, 'I think everybody should be able to play.' I believe the next generation will change and reflect those views."

In "Crossover," Justin Lin's 2000 documentary about the Japanese American leagues, 7-year-old Tricia Ota appears in one scene, dribbling a basketball. A decade later, after her Lions were routed by the more balanced Cougars, she was asked to look beyond the Northern California tournament that starts this week.

"I don't like the idea of having a league just for Asians," she said. "I like the idea of broadening (the rosters) on the church and club teams. One of the leagues in (the Bay Area) didn't let one of our teammates (St. Francis' Aurora Singh) play in a tournament last summer, so we all decided not to play. We didn't feel it was right.

"Basketball isn't supposed to be about that. It's not just a sport."

Coach Harvey Tahara's emphasis on teamwork has helped the McClatchy High School girls basketball team become a regional power.

McClatchy's Tricia Ota, center, has battled knee injuries, but rejoined the team late in her senior season. "I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this," Ota said.

Leslie Leong, center, and her Kennedy High School teammates celebrate a Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal win over McClatchy on Wednesday night in Stockton.

The McClatchy Lions and Kennedy Cougars have tussled for decades, their prep rivalry among the most ferocious in the region. Yet sometimes – especially within Sacramento's Asian American community during tournament time – the dynamics become confusing, confounding, overwhelming.

Imagine cheering against your sister or your son? Shoving an elbow into the abdomen of a best friend? Marrying someone whose letter jacket is McClatchy red when yours is Kennedy green?

"I'm still a Cougar," insisted Julie Ota, a former All-City player at Kennedy. "My husband was All-City at McClatchy and now coaches at McClatchy. And our daughter plays for McClatchy. So as you can imagine, we have some pretty interesting conversations."

What makes this rivalry between schools five miles apart so uniquely fascinating is that its fan base encompasses much of the region's Asian community and, in some respects, traces back to the early 1940s, when an estimated 120,000 residents of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps.

Baseball was far more popular among Asians before World War II, but basketball leagues featuring males and females flourished in the camps. When the final camp closed in 1946 and the Japanese were relocated, they formed leagues throughout the country, with basketball a primary means of furthering traditions and securing cultural and social bonds among families.

"When we relocated, we had to form our own leagues because of segregation," recalled Tsuto Ota, 83, the family patriarch and a native Sacramentan who spent four years at Tule Lake. "We couldn't even join the American Bowling Congress, so we started our own bowling leagues, too.

"At some point, we became more assimilated, and while some still played baseball, basketball became more and more popular among younger generations."

Girls game on the rise

Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation officials estimate 850 to 1,000 area youngsters – many as young as 5 or 6 – compete in Asian church or instructional leagues, or play for club teams and Amateur Athletic Union squads. The number of participants is estimated at more than 10,000 in Southern California and several thousand in the Bay Area.

The advantages of competing extensively in organized basketball programs has benefited the area's boys prep teams for years, but lately, the girls are the ones moving up the rankings, storming the court and packing the stands.

When the Kennedy and McClatchy girls teams were ranked Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, their Jan. 23 meeting at McClatchy's main gym attracted a raucous, sold-out crowd. Another 50 or so partisans – relatives, friends, friends of friends – had to peer through the narrow windows from outside.

The scene inside was a vivid spectacle of sports and community, and except for the sellout part, was repeated Wednesday night, when the teams met in a California Interscholastic Federation Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal at the much larger Pacific facility in Stockton.

The Legion of Lions fan club members occupied sections of bleachers and stood throughout. They painted assorted body parts red, their voices raised to heckle the Cougars and applaud McClatchy. Across the court, members of Kennedy's Green Scream Machine maintained an equally vocal and colorful presence.

"The kids play on other teams at other times of the year, but the epicenter is Kennedy and McClatchy," said Rod Kunisaki, former president of the Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation and father of former Lions star and current assistant Jessica Kunisaki.

"When Jessica lost to Kennedy, some of those other kids were my cousins. But I would tell them: 'You can't come over to the house for three days. (Laugh) Don't even knock on the door.' "

Take a closer look, though, and the audience reflects basketball's increasing significance within the Asian community, with almost everyone related or connected to someone favoring the opponent's color; after awhile, the colors begin to blur.

"Some of us have been playing together since we were in middle school," said Kennedy forward Leslie Leong, "and our parents and grandparents are good friends. And while we're competitive, one of the best things about playing are the socials and the dances afterward.

"I don't want to say basketball is our life, but it's a very big part of our life from the time we're little kids."

Friends become family

When teary Lions senior Tricia Ota limped off the court Wednesday night, her left leg protected by a balky brace, she was embraced by several of her opponents. Having overcome multiple knee surgeries since her freshman season, she rejoined the team only weeks ago to put a glossier finish on her basketball experience and give a close friend a fond farewell.

"When we won the section title three years ago," said Ota, "that was the best moment of my life. I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this.

"It's not just a sport. Ariel and I have been together since freshman year, and she has been so supportive of me through everything. She has become one of my best friends. We're so appreciative that she stayed at McClatchy."

Ariel, of course, is the highly recruited Ariel Thomas, a Bee Player of the Year candidate and future member of Paul Westhead's squad at Oregon. Thomas, who is African American, is everything most of the current Lions are not: quick and athletic, tall enough to excel at the next level, and owner of a major college basketball scholarship.

One of the issues confronting the McClatchy girls team is increasingly common to the boys – Thomas routinely was approached and urged to transfer to a more dominant program such as Sacramento High School or Kennedy.

"We don't have a lot of post players," joked Lions coach Harvey Tahara, who enjoyed previous success coaching the boys. "If we've got a kid who is 5-5 or 5-6, they're automatically in the post. That's probably why the girls have become more dominant.

"Size is more of a factor for boys at the high school level. But we were able to build around Ariel, and the fact she stayed says a lot about her loyalty."

Thomas resisted pressure to transfer from her father, among others. Despite occasional frustrations, she has no regrets.

"Most of the teams we play against are taller," she said, "and other players look down on you, like, 'Wow, your team is so short.'

"But we maximize our strengths, which is a great coach, fundamentals and teamwork. We try to run them (foes) out of the gym. Plus, these are my close friends. McClatchy has become a family to me."

Blurring the lines

The thorniest issue facing the Asian leagues involves the very definition of family, or ethnicity. Through the years, leagues originally restricted to Japanese expanded to include other Asians. As intermarriage and assimilation persists, this has led to other questions regarding ethnicity and eligibility.

"If you look at most of the leagues," said Christina Chin, a UC Davis graduate and UCLA doctoral student who has written about basketball's influence on the Asian community, "the numbers vary a lot. It's very informal. What percentage of you has to be Asian to compete? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

"These leagues were started because of segregation, so Japanese Americans had their own space and could preserve their culture. But in my research, what I have found is that the rules are changing. The older folks want to keep it the way it was, but the kids say, 'I think everybody should be able to play.' I believe the next generation will change and reflect those views."

In "Crossover," Justin Lin's 2000 documentary about the Japanese American leagues, 7-year-old Tricia Ota appears in one scene, dribbling a basketball. A decade later, after her Lions were routed by the more balanced Cougars, she was asked to look beyond the Northern California tournament that starts this week.

"I don't like the idea of having a league just for Asians," she said. "I like the idea of broadening (the rosters) on the church and club teams. One of the leagues in (the Bay Area) didn't let one of our teammates (St. Francis' Aurora Singh) play in a tournament last summer, so we all decided not to play. We didn't feel it was right.

"Basketball isn't supposed to be about that. It's not just a sport."

Coach Harvey Tahara's emphasis on teamwork has helped the McClatchy High School girls basketball team become a regional power.

McClatchy's Tricia Ota, center, has battled knee injuries, but rejoined the team late in her senior season. "I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this," Ota said.

Leslie Leong, center, and her Kennedy High School teammates celebrate a Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal win over McClatchy on Wednesday night in Stockton.

The McClatchy Lions and Kennedy Cougars have tussled for decades, their prep rivalry among the most ferocious in the region. Yet sometimes – especially within Sacramento's Asian American community during tournament time – the dynamics become confusing, confounding, overwhelming.

Imagine cheering against your sister or your son? Shoving an elbow into the abdomen of a best friend? Marrying someone whose letter jacket is McClatchy red when yours is Kennedy green?

"I'm still a Cougar," insisted Julie Ota, a former All-City player at Kennedy. "My husband was All-City at McClatchy and now coaches at McClatchy. And our daughter plays for McClatchy. So as you can imagine, we have some pretty interesting conversations."

What makes this rivalry between schools five miles apart so uniquely fascinating is that its fan base encompasses much of the region's Asian community and, in some respects, traces back to the early 1940s, when an estimated 120,000 residents of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps.

Baseball was far more popular among Asians before World War II, but basketball leagues featuring males and females flourished in the camps. When the final camp closed in 1946 and the Japanese were relocated, they formed leagues throughout the country, with basketball a primary means of furthering traditions and securing cultural and social bonds among families.

"When we relocated, we had to form our own leagues because of segregation," recalled Tsuto Ota, 83, the family patriarch and a native Sacramentan who spent four years at Tule Lake. "We couldn't even join the American Bowling Congress, so we started our own bowling leagues, too.

"At some point, we became more assimilated, and while some still played baseball, basketball became more and more popular among younger generations."

Girls game on the rise

Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation officials estimate 850 to 1,000 area youngsters – many as young as 5 or 6 – compete in Asian church or instructional leagues, or play for club teams and Amateur Athletic Union squads. The number of participants is estimated at more than 10,000 in Southern California and several thousand in the Bay Area.

The advantages of competing extensively in organized basketball programs has benefited the area's boys prep teams for years, but lately, the girls are the ones moving up the rankings, storming the court and packing the stands.

When the Kennedy and McClatchy girls teams were ranked Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, their Jan. 23 meeting at McClatchy's main gym attracted a raucous, sold-out crowd. Another 50 or so partisans – relatives, friends, friends of friends – had to peer through the narrow windows from outside.

The scene inside was a vivid spectacle of sports and community, and except for the sellout part, was repeated Wednesday night, when the teams met in a California Interscholastic Federation Sac-Joaquin Section Division I semifinal at the much larger Pacific facility in Stockton.

The Legion of Lions fan club members occupied sections of bleachers and stood throughout. They painted assorted body parts red, their voices raised to heckle the Cougars and applaud McClatchy. Across the court, members of Kennedy's Green Scream Machine maintained an equally vocal and colorful presence.

"The kids play on other teams at other times of the year, but the epicenter is Kennedy and McClatchy," said Rod Kunisaki, former president of the Sacramento Asian Sports Foundation and father of former Lions star and current assistant Jessica Kunisaki.

"When Jessica lost to Kennedy, some of those other kids were my cousins. But I would tell them: 'You can't come over to the house for three days. (Laugh) Don't even knock on the door.' "

Take a closer look, though, and the audience reflects basketball's increasing significance within the Asian community, with almost everyone related or connected to someone favoring the opponent's color; after awhile, the colors begin to blur.

"Some of us have been playing together since we were in middle school," said Kennedy forward Leslie Leong, "and our parents and grandparents are good friends. And while we're competitive, one of the best things about playing are the socials and the dances afterward.

"I don't want to say basketball is our life, but it's a very big part of our life from the time we're little kids."

Friends become family

When teary Lions senior Tricia Ota limped off the court Wednesday night, her left leg protected by a balky brace, she was embraced by several of her opponents. Having overcome multiple knee surgeries since her freshman season, she rejoined the team only weeks ago to put a glossier finish on her basketball experience and give a close friend a fond farewell.

"When we won the section title three years ago," said Ota, "that was the best moment of my life. I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this.

"It's not just a sport. Ariel and I have been together since freshman year, and she has been so supportive of me through everything. She has become one of my best friends. We're so appreciative that she stayed at McClatchy."

Ariel, of course, is the highly recruited Ariel Thomas, a Bee Player of the Year candidate and future member of Paul Westhead's squad at Oregon. Thomas, who is African American, is everything most of the current Lions are not: quick and athletic, tall enough to excel at the next level, and owner of a major college basketball scholarship.

One of the issues confronting the McClatchy girls team is increasingly common to the boys – Thomas routinely was approached and urged to transfer to a more dominant program such as Sacramento High School or Kennedy.

"We don't have a lot of post players," joked Lions coach Harvey Tahara, who enjoyed previous success coaching the boys. "If we've got a kid who is 5-5 or 5-6, they're automatically in the post. That's probably why the girls have become more dominant.

"Size is more of a factor for boys at the high school level. But we were able to build around Ariel, and the fact she stayed says a lot about her loyalty."

Thomas resisted pressure to transfer from her father, among others. Despite occasional frustrations, she has no regrets.

"Most of the teams we play against are taller," she said, "and other players look down on you, like, 'Wow, your team is so short.'

"But we maximize our strengths, which is a great coach, fundamentals and teamwork. We try to run them (foes) out of the gym. Plus, these are my close friends. McClatchy has become a family to me."

Blurring the lines

The thorniest issue facing the Asian leagues involves the very definition of family, or ethnicity. Through the years, leagues originally restricted to Japanese expanded to include other Asians. As intermarriage and assimilation persists, this has led to other questions regarding ethnicity and eligibility.

"If you look at most of the leagues," said Christina Chin, a UC Davis graduate and UCLA doctoral student who has written about basketball's influence on the Asian community, "the numbers vary a lot. It's very informal. What percentage of you has to be Asian to compete? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

"These leagues were started because of segregation, so Japanese Americans had their own space and could preserve their culture. But in my research, what I have found is that the rules are changing. The older folks want to keep it the way it was, but the kids say, 'I think everybody should be able to play.' I believe the next generation will change and reflect those views."

In "Crossover," Justin Lin's 2000 documentary about the Japanese American leagues, 7-year-old Tricia Ota appears in one scene, dribbling a basketball. A decade later, after her Lions were routed by the more balanced Cougars, she was asked to look beyond the Northern California tournament that starts this week.

"I don't like the idea of having a league just for Asians," she said. "I like the idea of broadening (the rosters) on the church and club teams. One of the leagues in (the Bay Area) didn't let one of our teammates (St. Francis' Aurora Singh) play in a tournament last summer, so we all decided not to play. We didn't feel it was right.

"Basketball isn't supposed to be about that. It's not just a sport."

Coach Harvey Tahara's emphasis on teamwork has helped the McClatchy High School girls basketball team become a regional power.

McClatchy's Tricia Ota, center, has battled knee injuries, but rejoined the team late in her senior season. "I don't know what I would have done if I wasn't a part of all this," Ota said.

When Jim Amos announced the opening of Tasti D-Lite's new store in Nashville last July, he got an unexpected publicity boost. Country music star and Nashville resident Taylor Swift took it upon herself to promote the opening, sending an enthusiastic Twitter message to her 800,000 followers on the social networking service. "We're getting a Tasti D-Lite in Nashville," Swift wrote. "YES!!"

Amos, who became CEO of Tasti D-Lite in 2007 after leading a buyout of the company, was certainly pleased, but high-profile endorsements of his product have become almost the norm. Since its founding in New York City in 1987, Tasti D-Lite, which sells frozen dairy desserts that taste like ice cream but are lower in fat and calories, had grown with the help of plenty of celebrity endorsements and prominent placements in television shows like Sex and the City.

But as Amos looked to expand beyond New York City, where most of Tasti D-Lite's 60 stores are located, he decided to focus on winning endorsements of a more pedestrian kind: those made by regular customers on social networks. "The celebrities helped us with word of mouth before the technology was there," says Amos. "But now with Twitter and Facebook, regular customers are having conversations that can be used to build our brand." Amos imagined thousands of happy customers raving about his company's low-calorie desserts to their online pals.

The strategy makes sense. Both Twitter, with some 60 million monthly users, and Facebook, with more than 350 million, encourage people to spread the word about rock bands, television shows, and companies they love. (Users do this by "following" a person or company on Twitter or becoming a "fan" on Facebook.) The services have helped turn C-list celebrities into hot commodities, insurgent political campaigns into well-funded machines, and struggling companies into hip brands. But how do you get followers if you are not famous? And how can you persuade people to endorse a seemingly mundane company or product?

It's not easy. "Most people won't spontaneously want to become fans of your company," says Victoria Ransom, the CEO of Wildfire Interactive, a Palo Alto, California, company that specializes in helping businesses attract fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. "You have to give customers a reason to engage with your brand." For anywhere from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars, Ransom's company will build you a Facebook application designed to attract new fans to your company's page. The applications typically try to entice users with a contest -- say, a chance to win a $50 gift certificate -- or a coupon. Once a customer clicks on the link, she is directed to a page that asks her to input her Facebook account information. When the customer completes the form, a link to the promotion typically will be published on her Facebook page, which can attract more fans.

Wildfire's approach worked for Edible Arrangements, a Wallingford, Connecticut, franchiser that sells fruit baskets in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. In a ploy to boost holiday sales, the company announced in October that it would be giving away a coupon that could be redeemed for a $15 box of chocolate-dipped fruit to the first 100,000 people who became a fan of the company on Facebook. Within four days, Edible Arrangements had reached its goal. Many of the new fans went on to make a purchase. Sales were up more than 10 percent compared with the previous year. "The Facebook program exposed a lot of new customers to the company," says Stephen Thomas, the company's vice president of marketing. Edible Arrangements paid about $15,000 for the promotion, plus the cost of the free merchandise.

If you can't afford to give stuff away, you can always just ask customers to give you some Facebook love for free. That was the approach taken by Powell's Books, a bookstore in Portland, Oregon. Beginning in 2008, the company placed small graphics at the bottom of every page on its website and e-mail newsletters. These little advertisements entreated customers to "Find us on Facebook" and "Follow us on Twitter." For a month, Powell's even used the marquee in front of its store to ask for Facebook fans, which was surprisingly effective, says Megan Zabel, who manages the company's social media efforts.

Over the course of a year, the company went from roughly 3,000 fans on Facebook to 38,500 and from a few hundred followers on Twitter to more than 12,000. Although the campaign has not directly produced a large revenue increase, Zabel says the fans' and followers' online purchases have more than offset the cost of the campaign. In addition, having a large fan base creates the impression of a vibrant community that she thinks will help Powell's in the long run. "The more fans we have, the more people are proselytizing our brand," she says. "Word of mouth is one of the most powerful selling tools."

Tasti D-Lite's social networking strategy represents a new twist on the approach taken by Powell's. Rather than simply asking for followers, in January, the company began asking its customers to turn over their Twitter account information as part of Tasti D-Lite's loyalty program. Frequent shoppers get a point for every dollar they spend and an extra point if they post a message about their purchase on Twitter. Fifty points gets a customer a free medium cone or cup.

To get points for tweeting, a customer submits his Twitter username and password. Then, every time he buys something at a store, he swipes a loyalty card at the register. Tasti D-Lite's point-of-sale system automatically logs in to his Twitter account and sends a tweet informing his followers of the purchase. "I just earned 9 TastiRewards points at Tasti D-Lite New Rochelle," was the Twitter message posted on the account of Drew King after he and his wife treated themselves to dessert in mid-January. It included a link to a website that encouraged King's friends to sign up for the program.

Creating the world's first tweeting cash register didn't come cheap -- Tasti D-Lite spent more than $10,000 to modify its point-of-sale system -- but Amos expects the program to pay for itself as more customers sign up for it. "It's going to be very profitable," he says. "Word-of-mouth marketing has always been extremely important to this company, but Twitter has the capacity to increase word-of-mouth discussions exponentially. It's like the difference between snail mail and e-mail."

One day in December I was visiting family and picked up my niece from daycare before her balloon got turned into an animal. It was disappointing. So when we got back to her house, I pulled out my iPhone and showed her an app called Aardvark. We asked Aardvark how we could turn one long balloon into a balloon animal. My niece jumped up and down with excitement every time we got an iPhone push notification that someone out on the internet had an answer to offer. The first 3 people said "drawn an eye on it and call it a snake." That was funny the first time. Then, someone came through with a great link to good instructions for making a balloon animal. We made one, we were happy and proud, and we'd become the kind of people who knew how to make balloon animals.

A month later, my niece was visiting my house and we gave her a package of balloons. She whipped up a dog, a horse and a princess crown in minutes. Her mom asked her how she did it and you know what she said? "The Aardvark taught me how to do it!" Google announced today that it bought the company that made that iPhone app. It feels like some closure on my past year of hunting the story of the Aardvark, both personally and professionally.

Sponsor

I've asked for and received from Aardvark advice on cooking, home repair, what color shirt to wear on TV, whether I can easily catch a cab at a particular BART stop and how to make balloon animals.

Today Google officially announced the acquisition of Aardvark and its availability in Google Labs. I thought I'd take this opportunity to share a few stories about my year following this company and using its service. There's no knowing how much attention the project will get inside Google, so this may be a case of "it was fun while it lasted." But it sure was fun. And perhaps this acquisition won't be the last we hear of Aardvark, after all.

Founded by ex-Google employees, here's how Aardvark describes its team that built the system: "Over 2009, the company built an amazing technical team of over twenty people, including engineers from each of Silicon Valley's major technology companies, four AI Ph.D.s, and founders from a dozen different successful startups." Those people are all Google employees now and have a tidy pile of money.

The price may well be based on the company's failure to find a substantial number of users. Aardvark said earlier this month that it had fewer than 100,000 registered users. So be it. The founders will now return to Google, their former employer, with a powerful proof of concept, an eye for the huge Google user base and several million dollars in each of their pockets. Maybe they'll continue to work on Aardvark itself and maybe they won't. Only time will tell.

In the mean time, I've had a great time using Aardvark and have even put it to work for me professionally.

Last October I was walking down the street in San Francisco after lunch, headed back to the Moscone Center to see what was rumored to be a big announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit. Microsoft was going to announce that it cut a deal with Twitter to include Tweets in Bing search results. The much more connected Kara Swisher broke the news and I was trying to think of how to add value to the conversation with my coverage. So I put out a tweet: "Are there any User Experience experts at Web 2.0 who can talk to me about Bing/Twitter integration?"

By the time I sat down on the floor of the crowded convention hall before the announcement, I hadn't gotten a single reply on Twitter. So I decided to fire up Aardvark. I asked it by IM, "are there any UX pros available right now to give me a live reaction to some news about to break?"

I was quickly delivered 3 suitable User Experience design professionals from around the country, asking me how they could help, through the Aardvark IM interface. I typed, copied and pasted as fast as I could - sending them the link to bing.com/twitter as soon as it was available, getting their thoughts, asking follow-up questions, separating three live interviews in one chat stream (chatting with Aardvark) into three separate interview chunks of text. It was crazy! I typed and thought and parsed as fast as I possibly could and then boom - within minutes of the announcement being over, I had a blog post up. Three User Experience professionals react to the way that the first major search engine to do so integrated the Twitter stream. It was quite a rush and something I couldn't have done in any other way, without Aardvark.

We all knew that Aardvark was born and raised to be sold, probably to Google. When Michael Arrington broke the news 2 months ago that Aardvark was in talks with Google, it wasn't a surprise. Nor was it a surprise that TechCrunch broke the story, Arrington has held an annual summer event at the offices of August Capital, Aardvark's lead investor, for years. He's very connected to the circle of people around Aardvark, as he is with hot Silicon Valley startups quite often.

A few days after that news came out, Aardvark CEO Max Ventilla was a guest on Leo Laporte's show This Week in Tech. I ended up butting in far too much, explaining Vark and telling stories in the TWiT chat room that Leo asked Max about live on the show. I was a little worried that Max was going to get tired of me. I'd been trading emails with him, cursing him for giving exclusives to other media outlets, interviewing him at length for our research report on the future of the Real-Time Web and just generally being a harassing fan and overeager news blogger.

After the show, I shot him an email anyway. I told him that I'm not connected enough to break the news that Aardvark is about to sell, but I'd like to try to out-write my competitors. Just like the New York Times writes obituaries for famous people before they die, I'd like to spend some time with him so I can write the story of Aardvark ahead of time, before it gets acquired.

He told me there was no rush, that nothing was really happening, but agreed to schedule a call. We scheduled some time, but that morning a pipe exploded in the basement of my house. I emailed him and said I'd reschedule sometime soon.

That was two weeks ago. I never got to dive deep into the story of Aardvark, before it got acquired, and now there's no telling what the future will bring for the company. But I did have a great time chasing Aardvark around in my personal and professional life over the last year. I know how to make a mean sweet potato and butternut squash soup thanks to Aardvark, and I'm not afraid to put certain Arm and Hammer products on my carpet to vacuum up, even if they aren't labeled for it explicitly. Thanks, Aardvark community.

These days I haven't been responding to my Aardvark IMs as much as I used to. I used to answer lots of questions, so now I get a lot of questions. Most of them are on topics I have no interest in. I spent the end of last year chasing down the next social search company that caught my fancy, the then-unlaunched Quora, built by some of the very first people to join and leave Facebook in the early days. I posted the first screenshots of Quora and use it regularly still, but as a web technology writer it's my job to be looking for the next new thing.

I still enjoy Aardvark and I love the ideas behind it. We'll see what happens to it at Google, but if absolutely nothing else: my niece and I now know how to make balloon animals. I think that's very cool.

Congrats on your sale, team Vark, and good luck changing the world of search at Google.

As you may have read, Israel has played a big role in relieving Haiti, following the hugely destructive earthquake. Unfortunately, the Israelis have a lot of experience in digging people out of rubble, etc. They are a people who have faced bombings over and over. At the end of 2003, there was a major earthquake in Bam, Iran. (Yeah, I know: “Bam,” an earthquake.) The Israelis were alacritous: They wanted to send rescue workers immediately. There was no time to waste, and Israel was very close, physically, to Iran. But Iran refused this aid and expertise. The government preferred that people die rather than suffer the ignominy of being rescued by Jews. This episode was a further indication of the psychosis prevalent in the Middle East. Fortunately, Haiti, for all of its sufferings, does not suffer from that.

I noticed an interesting piece by Marty Peretz of The New Republic -- noticed it because it was cited in Commentary’s Contentions. Peretz wrote,

I’ve just read the transcript of the president’s remarks about Haiti, the ones he made on January 15. He noted that, in addition to assistance from the United States, significant aid had also come from “Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, among others.” Am I missing another country that truly weighed in with truly consequential assistance? Ah, yes. There it is. Right there “among others.” Yes, the country to which I refer is “among others,” that one.

The fact is that, next to our country, Israel sent the largest contingent of trained rescue workers, doctors, and other medical personnel. The Israeli field hospital was the only one on the ground that could perform real surgery, which it did literally hundreds of times, while delivering -- as of last week -- at least 16 babies, including one premature infant and three caesarians. . . .

 

It’s not that Israeli participation in the Haiti horror was being kept secret. I myself saw it reported several times on television . . .

 

So didn’t Obama notice? For God’s sake, everybody noticed the deep Israeli involvement.

(For the full piece, go here.) In any case, it is rather remarkable that Israel, a tiny country very far away from Haiti, and with serious -- indeed, existential -- problems of its own, should find the time and resources to help this afflicted people in the Caribbean. Will the world credit Israel for it?

That question was merely rhetorical.

A reader wrote me with a story out of Tyler, Texas: here. In short, five churches in the area have been burned, in rapid succession. Actually, now there are six: as we see here. This has not made national news, as far as I’m aware. There is no racial angle. (Remember when church burnings were just about the biggest story in America?) Our reader says, “Seriously, have you ever heard of this many church burnings in a month? How is this not getting national coverage?”

It’s a fair question, I think. We have a big country, and there is a lot going on, from sea to shining sea (as Bill Buckley liked to say). Still, it’s a fair question.

I thought a line from an Associated Press report was just a little -- a little right-leaning, dare I say? Maybe sneakily conservative? Anyway, I smiled at the line. See what you think:

Oregon has set aside its history of shooting down tax increases on statewide ballots, with voters endorsing higher taxes on businesses and the rich amid a brutal economic slump.

 

Democrats in the Oregon Legislature made it as easy as they could for the voters to raise taxes on somebody else, and the electorate responded Tuesday by approving Measures 66 and 67.

“Democrats in the Oregon Legislature made it as easy as they could for the voters to raise taxes on somebody else” -- love it (not the action, the phrasing). (For the full report, go here.)

This story is sort of interesting. It’s about an Arab member of the Israeli legislature and his visit to Auschwitz. It got me to thinking about Jewish members of Arab legislatures, and . . .

Oh, wait . . .

Have you received your current issue -- your current issue of National Review? I have a piece called “Two Inconvenient Canadians.” Who are they? They’re Stephen McIntyre, a business consultant and maverick intellectual, and Ross McKitrick, an economist and professor. And why are they inconvenient? Well, they’re inconvenient to some -- they are inconvenient to the “global-warming red-hots,” as I call them in this piece. The crowd over at the CRU, and associated with them.

The CRU, let me remind you, is the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. They are the characters in “Climategate,” the eye-opening scandal that broke in November. They are also the ones who feed the IPCC all that golden information on which we have come to rely. The IPCC, you remember, is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.’s global-warming arm. The IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, with Al Gore.

But why are the two M’s -- McIntyre and McKitrick -- inconvenient? Because their work has called the hockey stick into serious question.

Okay, remember the hockey stick: the hockey-stick graph. This was the killer graphic used in the IPCC’s 2001 report -- the report we used to think of as especially flawed, until the 2007 one was exposed. The killer graph, and graphic, purported to show the global temperature from the year 1000 to the year 2000. Until about 1900, the line was relatively flat; then it shot sharply upward. The graph looked like a hockey stick. And it went all around the world, becoming an icon of global warming. On its basis, we were supposed to reorder our economies and our very way of living.

Anyway, I tell the story of the M’s in this piece, or at least some of the story. And I would like to give you a little extra here. As you know, those who don’t buy the Gore/IPCC line on global warming -- who are the least skeptical or critical -- are called “deniers.” This is perhaps the most obnoxious ploy of the global-warming people: to link their critics to Holocaust deniers.

I asked the two M’s about this “denier” charge. McKitrick answered coolly. He said, “Anyone who’s arguing any kind of complex issue affirms some things and denies other things, so you could use the term about anyone in the debate, if you focus only on the things he disputes rather than the things he argues for.”

And McIntyre’s response? Tinged with a wonderful indignation: “At some level, you should be able to criticize Michael Mann’s principal-components calculations without being called a ‘denier.’”

Michael Mann is the leader of the team that brought the world the “hockey stick.” More about him in a moment.



I also asked McKitrick this question: Why are so many people eager for the news to be bad? That is, why are they so committed to global warming -- to disastrous global warming as a reality -- and unwilling to consider evidence and arguments that the earth might be okay? McKitrick cited two reasons. They are obvious, but he stated them with satisfying clarity and straightforwardness. First, he said, environmentalists may be very keen to set back capitalism and enterprise. They once had air pollution as their issue. But capitalist societies proved brilliant at combating air pollution, and continued to grow. Now the opponents of capitalism have the vehicle of global warming.

And the second reason? Many businesses stand to make big money out of global warming -- out of a cap-and-trade scheme, in particular. There is cartelization to be had out of global warming.

Back to Michael Mann. My colleague Kevin Williamson alerted me to this item in the Wall Street Journal: which relates that Professor Mann has received more than $2.4 million in “stimulus” money. I think that’s a lot. Hard to be sure these days.

Finally, if you’re not up to speed on the latest “gate” involving global warming -- “Himalaya-gate” -- try this article from the Times of London. From the sound of it, the nature of the IPCC is Keystone Kops -- ideological Keystone Kops. More and more, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize is looking like one of the biggest boners the committee in Oslo has ever pulled.

Some days ago, I said something about records in sports, and I said that Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-game record was supposed to be the most unbreakable. Then Cal Ripken Jr. broke it -- and the consensus switched to DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.

A reader from River Falls, Wis., sent me a note. I’m not competent to verify it -- but I publish it, because it has the ring of authority, and is charming to read (I find):

Jay,

 

The most unbreakable Major League Baseball record is consecutive no-hitters (2), currently held by Johnny Vander Meer. At a rate of 1 no-hitter per 1,505.5 games, the odds of 3 straight by a pitcher are 3,412,261,291.375 to 1!

Also, the record for triple plays in one game is 2 (Twins vs. Bosox, 7/17/90). The odds of a three-triple-play game are 918,330,048 to 1, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations.

 

Surely the breaking of either of these records is less likely than the besting of Ripken’s endurance streak.

Our reader adds a P.S.: “One time, my wife asked me what guys think about late at night when they can’t sleep. I was embarrassed to tell her I think about baseball stats.”

Oh, there are worse things to think about, am I right?

This is quirky, friends, but it may be of interest to you: There is a website called House of Love. And, each week, they ask someone 11 Questions (always the same). And, this week, I am their person, their questionee: here.

Care for a language item? At the top of this column, I cite that piece by Marty Peretz. And it includes the line: “Yes, I think that the labors of the Israelis were edited out of Obama’s speech, either by his speechwriters (who have made dissing Israel their forté) or by his own oh-so-delicate but dishonest censoring mechanism.”

Did you check out those italics and that accent mark? Very odd. The writer, or his editor, apparently wants the word “forte,” meaning “strength” or “expertise,” pronounced “fortay,” like the musical marking meaning loud. I have addressed this issue a couple of times in this column. Once more unto the breach (Shakespeare said “unto,” but you can say “into,” if you want):

“Forte,” meaning “strength,” “expertise,” or “strong suit,” is pronounced “fort.” It comes from French, not Italian. Do you remember the old Groucho joke? Tallulah Bankhead says, “Singing isn’t really your forte.” Groucho responds, “I wish Knox were my forte.” Wouldn’t make sense pronouncing the word the Italian way -- as we do in music. (And if you double your “f,” what do you get? “Fortissimo,” right. And if you triple it? “Fortississimo,” correct.)

Increasingly, this battle is being lost, I think. People are saying “fortay,” for the strong-suit kind of “forte.” They are saying “air,” instead of “er,” for “err.” What can you do? Some people are so committed to “fortay,” they are even writing “forté.” Blech! Gross!

This final item is kind of a language item, too. In Tuesday’s Impromptus, I wrote about Rep. Marion Berry (D., Ark.), who is set to retire from Congress. I said I talked to him once and found his accent superb. I quickly added, “(Not that Arkansans and some others would have noticed any accent.)” A reader writes,

Dear Mr. Nordlinger:

 

What you said about Congressman Berry reminds me of the bulletin we received recently from the Orange County (N.C.) sheriff’s office, warning citizens to be on the lookout for a burglar going door-to-door to see whether people were at home. She was described as a “dark-complected white woman with a strong northern accent.” As non-southern transplants, as so many are in this Duke-UNC-Research Triangle area, we were amused until we suddenly realized that, indeed, for the locals, we were the ones with an accent! 

Thanks, guys, and see you soon.

The 33rd Portland International Film Festival will unspool February 11-28, 2010

The Northwest Film Center announces the 33rd Portland International Film Festival (PIFF), its annual cinematic foray of thought-provoking, engaging and entertaining works from around the globe. Over the last 33 years, the Festival has screened diverse and innovative films for thousands of people from throughout the Northwest. This year's Festival will showcase 117 compelling new films, from three dozen countries, including regional work, to an audience of more than 35,000.

The Festival opens Thursday, February 11, at the Newmark Theater in the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (PCPA) with the Italian film I Am Love, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, Burn After Reading, The Deep End). The film's score is provided by minimalist musician John Adams. Following the screening is an opening night party in the lobby of the Newmark Theater.

One of the region's most culturally diverse arts events, PIFF illuminates the dark and rainy weeks of February with a broad mix of new international films, visiting artists, shorts, documentaries, and animation. Films include Oscar submissions, works by new directors, documentary views, and a showcase of new Pacific Rim cinema from China, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia.

Highly anticipated films include the winner of the Cannes Jury Prize, Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (Great Britain); the international crime thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden); winner of the Cannes Jury Prize and Critics Prize, Police, Adjective (Romania); a Communist youth musical set in Moscow in 1955, Hipsters (Russia); director Peter Greenaway's Rembrandt's J'Accuse (Netherlands); and the newest film from French New Wave director Alain Resnais, Wild Grass (France).

Documentary film highlights include The Art of the Steal (U.S.), Don Argott's fascinating documentary on the struggle for control of the Barnes Foundation's valuable private art collection; For the Love of Movies (U.S.), directed by Boston Phoenix film critic Gerald Peary, including a post-film discussion with Peary and local film critics; and Videocracy (Sweden), a documentary that explores the mad world of Italian reality television.

Oscar contender highlights in the Festival include the winner of the Best Film, Director, and Screenplay awards at this year's Israeli Film Academy ceremony, Ajami (Israel), a collaboration between an Israeli filmmaker and a Palestinian filmmaker; and A Prophet (France), winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, about a 19-year-old Frenchman of Arab and Corsican descent who rises through the ranks of a Corsican gang. 

Portland highlights include the winner of the Grand Jury Prize for best U.S. documentary at the American Film Institute's Silver Docs Festival, October Country, from Portland directors Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri; and the shorts program Shorts III: Made in Portland, highlighting work from local filmmakers such as Joanna Priestley, Vanessa Renwick, and Karl Lind. 

In addition to the Newmark Theater, this year PIFF films will be shown at the Regal Broadway Metroplex, Cinema 21 and at the Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium in the Portland Art Museum. Press screenings will start February 1st, screening two films per day for two weeks. This year's PIFF premiere sponsors include The Oregonian and Regal Cinemas. Major sponsors include the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Wieden + Kennedy, LAIKA, Alaska Airlines, Blue Heron Paper, Stella Artois and Firesteed Winery.

The Northwest Film Center is a regional media arts resource and service organization founded to encourage the study, appreciation, and utilization of the moving image arts, foster their artistic and professional excellence, and help create a climate in which they flourish. In addition to the Portland International Film Festival, the Center produces the annual Northwest Film & Video Festival and a variety of year-round film and video exhibition, educational and informative programs serving the residents of Oregon and the Northwest region. 

Festival Screening Locations:

Regal Broadway Metroplex, 1000 SW Broadway

Newmark Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway

Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Avenue

NW Film Center, Whitsell Auditorium-Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue

Festival Ticket Outlet:

Mark Building, Portland Art Museum, 1119 SW Park Avenue

Opens February 3 - Daily from 12-6 pm

Advance tickets by phone at (503) 276-4310

Advance tickets online @ http://www.nwfilm.org/

Admission Prices: 

$10 General, $9 Portland Art Museum Members, $7 Silver Screen Friends

Opening Night Film and Party: $25 general, $20 Silver Screen Friends and Portland Art Museum members

Various Festival Passes available

Festival Schedule:

The full PIFF Program is available online February 3 at http://www.nwfilm.org/

To: Luke
From: Owen
Re: TK

Can't chat much; gotta hit the trail for California today. It'll be nice to see some old friends back in the Bay Area, but it will be a working visit.

One thing I'm contemplating, booze is stupid expensive in Oregon. Now, there's no sales tax on anything, so in the end it's probably all a wash. But I'd be a liar if I wasn't considering stopping right at the border on my way back to load up the trunk. I'm wondering if that sort of thing is illegal. I'm sort of hoping it is, so I can pretend like I'm a moonshiner taking the weekly load over to Bristol back in the old days where I'm from.

Some highlights:
BioWare: Mass Effect 2 Will Have Launch DLC, Won't Charge for It
Kotaku 'Shop Contest: Heavy Rain Edition
Rumor: Leaked 'Tech Demo" Footage of Final Fantasy: Fortress
Megadeth Hints at Big Plans for Guitar Hero
Stick Jockey: If It's In the Name, It's In the Game
Steam Account Sells for $1,000 on eBay

Confused about commenting on Kotaku? Read our FAQ.

Don’t forget to Read The History of My Homelessness, Part 4. You should probably read it before this post, but that’s up to you. That said, here goes:

At the time where The History of My Homelessness ends, I thought of calling some of my old (pre-Californai, pre Oregon) friends and ex-clients. All where people who had previously hired me to do work for them. I had not called them before while homeless, don’t ask me why, I just hadn’t. Well, one of them, a real estate mogul in South Florida, said to me, “Hey, glad you called, I want to build a seminar oriented web site, blog and start a series of audio and video podcasts.

I sat there stunned. I got my act together and said I’m your man. He sent me a couple thousand as a retainer and we started discussing what he wanted done. Again, long story short, I decided to drive to Hollywood Florida, praying my car would survive the trip, where he would put me up in one of the places he was selling, the rent being part of my pay. I now take home $26,000 a year, take home, mind you, after taxes, and have a place to live. I’ve been in he hospital twice since getting here, and had to buy a lot of expensive meds and Scrappy, my car, broke down and had to be sent off to the junkyard. R. I. P, Scrappy. All these things combined with having to buy everything needed to set up housekeeping:

Think about it, just making a hamburger required my getting:

• A Hot plate (this place has no kitchen, more later)
• A skillet
• Oil
• Buns,
• Ketchup
• Salt
• Pepper
• Plate
• Spatula

Oh, yes, and ground beef.

Do you see the problem? To mop the floor, I needed a broom, dustpan, bucket, mop and floor soap. Trash? Needed cans, plastic trash bags. On and on. Adding up the costs of a minimal set of things to enable simple housekeeping came to nearly $1000.00 on it’s own. Not counting the vacuum cleaner I finally broke down and bought when I could no longer take how the carpet looked.

Come to think of it, crossing the country was horribly expensive, The heat was unbearable and I had no air conditioning. With temps over one hundred-twenty degrees in California and remaining over one hundred all the way to Florida, I ended up sleeping days in a motel, driving nights. There was no chance of sleeping in the car, even if I could find shade. Even Butters was having a hard time of it. I needed to do an oil change before and after the trip (every three thousand miles, remember?) I needed to buy three tires along the way. I had to replace fan belts, which broke and require paid for towing - recall I used up the last of my insurance company towing when my timing belt went.) Long story short, the two thousand retainer went completely and then some in crossing the country and buying some, but not all, of my household supplies. The hospitalizations since then, along with the meds, the car break down, needing to ride cabs since I cannot walk to the bus stop and the ordinary cost of living things, food, cloths, gas while I had the car, renewal of my insurance (sigh, two weeks before car broke down) and all that has resulted in my only being able save a grand total of $320.00 so far. Pathetic. And I need a car–badly! Cabs are horribly expensive.

So, that’s where I am now, I have a small Apartment, 12 X 20, with a bathroom, a kitchen sink and counter, but only an under the counter fridge and electric appliances in place of a stove. A job that pays well, but nowhere near what a corporate job of the type I used to working would pay, in a state, county, city that offers no other work for me when this job is done. Thankfully, this job will last quite a while yet and after I replace my car, if my health will hold, I can get some savings put aside. Florida has a state sponsored insurance group policy for people that are self employed, etc., very unusual. I can buy insurance at group rates from a lot of companies here for about $250.00 a month. Getting this ASAP, wish I’d known about this prior to the last two trips to the hospital.

Things are up and are going up higher for me. But right now, if for any reason I lost my job, right now, I’d be worse off than I was before leaving Ca. No friends who’d take me or Butters in here. No car to live in, I’d be on the street homeless. Much worse weather. Though I’m not likely to be homeless at this moment, you never know, so I have horrible heart burn constantly, thanks to stressing over this. I’m desperate to get money saved aside, but when you are this broke, any little thing can wipe out any little savings you’ve managed. And so it has done for me, been knocked back to $0.00 four times so far.

I am so thankful for my friend who hired me to do this work for him. I have no clue where I would be if not for him. Despite it all, I still fear reprising homelessness.

 This too shall pass.

P. S; Sorry it took so long to write this, but carpal tunnel turns out to be horribly painful and I’ve had to type all this one handed.

Sensing that it is Christmas, and that Christmas is the time for giving, Nintendo's weekly download update is this week suitably festive.

Not only do American Wii owners get the pleasant surprise of Castlevania The Adventure ReBirth on WiiWare and The Oregon Trail on DSiWare, but PilotWings - the original, Super Nintendo great - is now available on the Virtual Console.

First Smash Bros., now PilotWings...it's like the Virtual Console is suddenly relevant/appealing again!

Here's the full line-up for this week:

WiiWare

Castlevania The Adventure ReBirth
Publisher: Konami Digital Entertainment
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: T (Teen) - Animated Blood, Fantasy Violence
Price: 1,000 Wii Points™
Description: Another 100 years have passed since the death of Count Dracula, but his curse has emerged once again within the realms of Transylvania. Play the role of the ultimate gothic hero from the long lineage of vampire hunters, the Belmont clan, and rid the universe of Dracula's legion of darkness and doom. Based on the classic 1989 original Castlevania: The Adventure, this WiiWare version will allow players of a new generation - and older fans - to experience one of the most popular games within the storied Castlevania timeline from a new perspective.

Eat! Fat! FIGHT!
Publisher: TECMO
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10 and Older) - Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief
Price: 1,000 Wii Points
Description: Forget about being healthy. Here's a game that celebrates eating, getting fat and fighting. Hold the Wii Remote controller horizontally and tilt it left, right, up or down to perform all kinds of lifts and throws just like in real sumo. There are also hidden moves like suplexes and scrapbusters thrown in for fun. Use all the moves you learn in tournaments around the world to reach the peak of sumo and become a yokozuna. In ONE PLAYER mode, play eating or sparring mini-games to make your wrestler stronger and change his look. You can also use your own Mii™ character's face on your wrestler. In TWO PLAYER mode, take on another person using default wrestlers or the wrestlers that you have created. (Additional accessories are required for two-player mode and are sold separately.) Chow down, bulk up and fight on to become the strongest sumo wrestler ever.

RABBIDS LAB
Publisher: Ubisoft
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) - Cartoon Violence
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: A raving Rabbid is stuck inside the Wii Remote controller. Come play with him. First, try interacting with him by moving the Wii Remote or pressing the buttons and seeing how much he loves it. Once you've gotten to know the crazy guy, it's time to change his appearance in the Lab. Mess with his head and place seasonal accessories on him, or change his look entirely with the painting module. When you've made your raving Rabbid completely unique, you can take a photo and send it in a Wii™ message to show your Wii Friends (broadband Internet connection required).

The Magic Obelisk
Publisher: GAME ARTS Co., Ltd.
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) - Comic Mischief
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: The Magic Obelisk is an action-adventure game in which you become Popo, a light spirit. Your mission is to guide Lukus, a tree spirit, to each stage's goal while moving only within the shadow. You can help him do this by shining your light near the mysterious magic obelisks, allowing you to create and connect shadows to solve tricks and gimmicks along the way. Join Lukus as he travels through a light-filled realm filled with quirky creatures and spirits, trying to find the perfect spot to become a tree. Experience meaningful encounters and partings, climb hills, cross rivers and traverse a vast desert on your way to the very edge of the world.

Virtual Console

PilotWings
Original platform: Super NES™
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) - Mild Violence
Price: 800 Wii Points
Description: Join the Flight Club to take to the skies and experience a variety of aerial activities. Take off and pilot a biplane through rings along a predetermined flight path, or drift serenely in a hang glider, catching thermal currents to gain altitude. In either case, just be sure to stick the landing. Looking for more speed? Strap on the rocket belt to blast your way around an obstacle course. If that's not enough, reach maximum velocity as you tackle a skydiving lesson at 3,800 feet. Complete specific objectives within a set time limit to score points (and maybe even a bonus chance) and obtain certification in eight different lessons. Your goals will become more challenging, and weather conditions will make controlling your vehicle more difficult as you progress. If you succeed, you will be rewarded with the opportunity to pilot an attack helicopter on a daring rescue mission. It's time to earn your wings.

Nintendo DSiWare

The Oregon Trail
Publisher: Gameloft
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10 and Older) - Comic Mischief, Mild Cartoon Violence, Use of Tobacco
Price: 800 Nintendo DSi Points™
Description: Westward, ho! Your favorite pioneering adventure game takes you on an exciting, historic, side-scrolling adventure with your Nintendo DSi™ system. Take the Oregon Trail experience further than ever before with all of the decision-making and problem-solving fun of the original game plus additional challenges. Leave your mark on America's history. Take a picture of yourself at each landmark with the Nintendo DSi system's built-in camera. You'll have your portrait and party's name printed in the Daily Oregon Trail newspaper in the game. Play eight skill-based mini-games that will impact your resources: Hunting, Fishing, River Crossing, Rafting, Wagon Repairing, Telegraph, Berry Picking and Gold Panning. Random events faced by real pioneers - such as disease, bandits and hitchhikers - and side missions add more excitement to your westward trek.

SUDOKU SENSEI
Publisher: Hudson Entertainment
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Introducing 100 "Super Hard Puzzles" for the hardened sudoku veteran. All puzzles are skillfully designed for a level of satisfaction that computer-generated puzzles just can't offer. You can play through puzzles to learn about rules and controls in Tutorials mode. Other handy features include Write Mode and Temp Number for an easier, more enjoyable sudoku experience.

Glow Artisan
Publisher: Powerhead Games
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Solve mind-bending puzzles in this unique and colorful game. Use your wits and ingenuity to solve more than 100 puzzles and earn more than 300 medals. Play Time Trial, Randomizer and Multiplayer modes for an endless supply of new challenges. Create new puzzles with the built-in editor or use the Nintendo DSi Camera application to turn your photos into puzzles.

Master of Illusion™ Express: Psychic Camera
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 200 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Master of Illusion Express titles include mind-boggling magic tricks that you perform with your Nintendo DSi system. Learn the illusions, practice them and amaze your friends. Your audience will never look at your Nintendo DSi system the same way again after Master of Illusion Express: Psychic Camera proves that it has psychic powers. Astound others by taking their picture and revealing an item (such as a card, picture, letter or number) that they're thinking about.

Arcade Hoops Basketball
Publisher: Skyworks Interactive, Inc.
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 200 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: From Skyworks comes the slickest basketball game for the Nintendo DSi system. See how many baskets you can sink in a fast-moving 45 seconds, using only your stylus and, of course, your lightning-fast hand-eye coordination. Arcade Hoops features your choice of three rockin' soundtracks, state-of-the-art 3-D graphics and thrilling, high-speed game play for the most fun possible in under a minute. Advanced hoopsters can move on to the progressive level, where a moving basket provides an additional challenge - plus the chance to rack up even more points. For the real pros, there's 3 Point mode, where speed and accuracy are a must as you shoot "threes" from downtown.

It's the final Monday for 2009, and thus the final Nintendo Update for 2009.  The Big N is helping us prepare for 2010 by giving us 10 new downloadable titles, including one that will kill you and your friends with dysentery.  That's right, the gaming classic The Oregon Trail is now available for DSiWare, along with more sudoku, some arcade b-ball, a psychic camera, and glowing puzzles.  WiiWare gets the release of a Castlevania remake, the Magic Obelisk, some rabbids, and a game to make you fat.  And for the Virtual Console, the SNES classic Pilotwings.

WiiWare

Castlevania The Adventure ReBirth
Publisher: Konami Digital Entertainment
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: T (Teen) – Animated Blood, Fantasy Violence
Price: 1,000 Wii Points^™
Description: Another 100 years have passed since the death of Count Dracula, but his curse has emerged once again within the realms of Transylvania. Play the role of the ultimate gothic hero from the long lineage of vampire hunters, the Belmont clan, and rid the universe of Dracula’s legion of darkness and doom. Based on the classic 1989 original Castlevania: The Adventure, this WiiWare version will allow players of a new generation – and older fans – to experience one of the most popular games within the storiedCastlevania timeline from a new perspective.

Eat! Fat! FIGHT!
Publisher: TECMO
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10 and Older) – Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief
Price: 1,000 Wii Points
Description: Forget about being healthy. Here’s a game that celebrates eating, getting fat and fighting. Hold the Wii Remote controller horizontally and tilt it left, right, up or down to perform all kinds of lifts and throws just like in real sumo. There are also hidden moves like suplexes and scrapbusters thrown in for fun. Use all the moves you learn in tournaments around the world to reach the peak of sumo and become a yokozuna. In ONE PLAYER mode, play eating or sparring mini-games to make your wrestler stronger and change his look. You can also use your own Mii^™ character’s face on your wrestler. In TWO PLAYER mode, take on another person using default wrestlers or the wrestlers that you have created. (Additional accessories are required for two-player mode and are sold separately.) Chow down, bulk up and fight on to become the strongest sumo wrestler ever.

RABBIDS LAB
Publisher: Ubisoft
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) – Cartoon Violence
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: A raving Rabbid is stuck inside the Wii Remote controller. Come play with him. First, try interacting with him by moving the Wii Remote or pressing the buttons and seeing how much he loves it. Once you’ve gotten to know the crazy guy, it’s time to change his appearance in the Lab. Mess with his head and place seasonal accessories on him, or change his look entirely with the painting module. When you’ve made your raving Rabbid completely unique, you can take a photo and send it in a Wii^™ message to show your Wii Friends (broadband Internet connection required).

The Magic Obelisk
Publisher: GAME ARTS Co., Ltd.
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) – Comic Mischief
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: The Magic Obelisk is an action-adventure game in which you become Popo, a light spirit. Your mission is to guide Lukus, a tree spirit, to each stage’s goal while moving only within the shadow. You can help him do this by shining your light near the mysterious magic obelisks, allowing you to create and connect shadows to solve tricks and gimmicks along the way. Join Lukus as he travels through a light-filled realm filled with quirky creatures and spirits, trying to find the perfect spot to become a tree. Experience meaningful encounters and partings, climb hills, cross rivers and traverse a vast desert on your way to the very edge of the world.

Virtual Console

PilotWings
Original platform: Super NES^™
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) – Mild Violence
Price: 800 Wii Points
Description: Join the Flight Club to take to the skies and experience a variety of aerial activities. Take off and pilot a biplane through rings along a predetermined flight path, or drift serenely in a hang glider, catching thermal currents to gain altitude. In either case, just be sure to stick the landing. Looking for more speed? Strap on the rocket belt to blast your way around an obstacle course. If that’s not enough, reach maximum velocity as you tackle a skydiving lesson at 3,800 feet. Complete specific objectives within a set time limit to score points (and maybe even a bonus chance) and obtain certification in eight different lessons. Your goals will become more challenging, and weather conditions will make controlling your vehicle more difficult as you progress. If you succeed, you will be rewarded with the opportunity to pilot an attack helicopter on a daring rescue mission. It’s time to earn your wings.

Nintendo DSiWare

The Oregon Trail
Publisher: Gameloft
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10 and Older) – Comic Mischief, Mild Cartoon Violence, Use of Tobacco
Price: 800 Nintendo DSi Points^™
Description: Westward, ho! Your favorite pioneering adventure game takes you on an exciting, historic, side-scrolling adventure with your Nintendo DSi^™ system. Take the Oregon Trail experience further than ever before with all of the decision-making and problem-solving fun of the original game plus additional challenges. Leave your mark on America’s history. Take a picture of yourself at each landmark with the Nintendo DSi system’s built-in camera. You’ll have your portrait and party’s name printed in the Daily Oregon Trailnewspaper in the game. Play eight skill-based mini-games that will impact your resources: Hunting, Fishing, River Crossing, Rafting, Wagon Repairing, Telegraph, Berry Picking and Gold Panning. Random events faced by real pioneers – such as disease, bandits and hitchhikers – and side missions add more excitement to your westward trek.

SUDOKU SENSEI
Publisher: Hudson Entertainment
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Introducing 100 “Super Hard Puzzles” for the hardened sudoku veteran. All puzzles are skillfully designed for a level of satisfaction that computer-generated puzzles just can’t offer. You can play through puzzles to learn about rules and controls in Tutorials mode. Other handy features include Write Mode and Temp Number for an easier, more enjoyable sudoku experience.

Glow Artisan
Publisher: Powerhead Games
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Solve mind-bending puzzles in this unique and colorful game. Use your wits and ingenuity to solve more than 100 puzzles and earn more than 300 medals. Play Time Trial, Randomizer and Multiplayer modes for an endless supply of new challenges. Create new puzzles with the built-in editor or use the Nintendo DSi Camera application to turn your photos into puzzles.

Master of Illusion^™ Express: Psychic Camera
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 200 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Master of Illusion Express titles include mind-boggling magic tricks that you perform with your Nintendo DSi system. Learn the illusions, practice them and amaze your friends. Your audience will never look at your Nintendo DSi system the same way again after Master of Illusion Express: Psychic Camera proves that it has psychic powers. Astound others by taking their picture and revealing an item (such as a card, picture, letter or number) that they’re thinking about.

Arcade Hoops Basketball
Publisher: Skyworks Interactive, Inc.
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 200 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: From Skyworks comes the slickest basketball game for the Nintendo DSi system. See how many baskets you can sink in a fast-moving 45 seconds, using only your stylus and, of course, your lightning-fast hand-eye coordination. Arcade Hoops features your choice of three rockin’ soundtracks, state-of-the-art 3-D graphics and thrilling, high-speed game play for the most fun possible in under a minute. Advanced hoopsters can move on to the progressive level, where a moving basket provides an additional challenge – plus the chance to rack up even more points. For the real pros, there’s 3 Point mode, where speed and accuracy are a must as you shoot “threes” from downtown.

There are only a few days left until the end of 2009, and Nintendo just announced 10 new games to help you ring in the New Year. Thanks to the WiiWare service, you can play the spooky Castlevania title, bulk up with Eat! Fat! FIGHT! or customize creatures with RABBIDS LAB. The Virtual Console service brings you PilotWings, while a new edition of The Oregon Trail arrives on the Nintendo DSiWare service. Here's the lineup of 10 new games from Nintendo:

WiiWare

Eat! Fat! FIGHT!
Publisher: TECMO
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10 and Older) – Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief
Price: 1,000 Wii Points
Description: Forget about being healthy. Here's a game that celebrates eating, getting fat and fighting. Hold the Wii Remote controller horizontally and tilt it left, right, up or down to perform all kinds of lifts and throws just like in real sumo. There are also hidden moves like suplexes and scrapbusters thrown in for fun. Use all the moves you learn in tournaments around the world to reach the peak of sumo and become a yokozuna. In ONE PLAYER mode, play eating or sparring mini-games to make your wrestler stronger and change his look. You can also use your own Mii character's face on your wrestler. In TWO PLAYER mode, take on another person using default wrestlers or the wrestlers that you have created. (Additional accessories are required for two-player mode and are sold separately.) Chow down, bulk up and fight on to become the strongest sumo wrestler ever.

RABBIDS LAB
Publisher: Ubisoft
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) – Cartoon Violence
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: A raving Rabbid is stuck inside the Wii Remote controller. Come play with him. First, try interacting with him by moving the Wii Remote or pressing the buttons and seeing how much he loves it. Once you've gotten to know the crazy guy, it's time to change his appearance in the Lab. Mess with his head and place seasonal accessories on him, or change his look entirely with the painting module. When you've made your raving Rabbid completely unique, you can take a photo and send it in a Wii message to show your Wii Friends (broadband Internet connection required).

The Magic Obelisk
Publisher: GAME ARTS Co., Ltd.
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) – Comic Mischief
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: The Magic Obelisk is an action-adventure game in which you become Popo, a light spirit. Your mission is to guide Lukus, a tree spirit, to each stage’s goal while moving only within the shadow. You can help him do this by shining your light near the mysterious magic obelisks, allowing you to create and connect shadows to solve tricks and gimmicks along the way. Join Lukus as he travels through a light-filled realm filled with quirky creatures and spirits, trying to find the perfect spot to become a tree. Experience meaningful encounters and partings, climb hills, cross rivers and traverse a vast desert on your way to the very edge of the world.

Virtual Console

Nintendo DSiWare

SUDOKU SENSEI
Publisher: Hudson Entertainment
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Introducing 100 "Super Hard Puzzles" for the hardened sudoku veteran. All puzzles are skillfully designed for a level of satisfaction that computer-generated puzzles just can't offer. You can play through puzzles to learn about rules and controls in Tutorials mode. Other handy features include Write Mode and Temp Number for an easier, more enjoyable sudoku experience.

Glow Artisan
Publisher: Powerhead Games
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Solve mind-bending puzzles in this unique and colorful game. Use your wits and ingenuity to solve more than 100 puzzles and earn more than 300 medals. Play Time Trial, Randomizer and Multiplayer modes for an endless supply of new challenges. Create new puzzles with the built-in editor or use the Nintendo DSi Camera application to turn your photos into puzzles.

Master of Illusion Express: Psychic Camera
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 200 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Master of Illusion Express titles include mind-boggling magic tricks that you perform with your Nintendo DSi system. Learn the illusions, practice them and amaze your friends. Your audience will never look at your Nintendo DSi system the same way again after Master of Illusion Express: Psychic Camera proves that it has psychic powers. Astound others by taking their picture and revealing an item (such as a card, picture, letter or number) that they're thinking about.

Arcade Hoops Basketball
Publisher: Skyworks Interactive, Inc.
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 200 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: From Skyworks comes the slickest basketball game for the Nintendo DSi system. See how many baskets you can sink in a fast-moving 45 seconds, using only your stylus and, of course, your lightning-fast hand-eye coordination. Arcade Hoops features your choice of three rockin' soundtracks, state-of-the-art 3-D graphics and thrilling, high-speed game play for the most fun possible in under a minute. Advanced hoopsters can move on to the progressive level, where a moving basket provides an additional challenge – plus the chance to rack up even more points. For the real pros, there's 3 Point mode, where speed and accuracy are a must as you shoot "threes" from downtown.

Users with broadband Internet access can redeem Wii Points or Nintendo DSi Points to download the games. Wii Points can be purchased in the Wii Shop Channel. Nintendo DSi Points can be purchased in the Nintendo DSi Shop. A Nintendo Points Card can also be purchased at retail locations. All points from one Nintendo Points Card must be redeemed in either the Nintendo DSi Shop or the Wii Shop Channel. They are not transferable and cannot be divided between the two systems.

Nintendo 64 classic PilotWings isn't usually regarded as among the most innovative titles in gaming history, but in its own quiet way, the game was revolutionary, at least to me. PilotWings was the first video game that I ever played that was relaxing as opposed to exciting or boring. You can just strap on a hang-glider and chill out. In fact, the game forces you to relax. You can't force PilotWings; you have to be zen to win. Anyway, PilotWings is available now on the Wii Virtual Console. Do not miss it.

Also of note: Classic "educational" game Oregon Trail is available on DSiWare. Relive the glory days of 4th grade computer lab with this Manifest Destiny simulator.

That's not all, though: Click the cut for a full list of newly available Nintendo downloadables, with official descriptions.

WiiWare

Castlevania The Adventure ReBirth
Publisher: Konami Digital Entertainment
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: T (Teen) - Animated Blood, Fantasy Violence
Price: 1,000 Wii Points™
Description: Another 100 years have passed since the death of Count Dracula, but his curse has emerged once again within the realms of Transylvania. Play the role of the ultimate gothic hero from the long lineage of vampire hunters, the Belmont clan, and rid the universe of Dracula's legion of darkness and doom. Based on the classic 1989 original Castlevania: The Adventure, this WiiWare version will allow players of a new generation - and older fans - to experience one of the most popular games within the storied Castlevania timeline from a new perspective.

Eat! Fat! FIGHT!
Publisher: TECMO
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10 and Older) - Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief
Price: 1,000 Wii Points
Description: Forget about being healthy. Here's a game that celebrates eating, getting fat and fighting. Hold the Wii Remote controller horizontally and tilt it left, right, up or down to perform all kinds of lifts and throws just like in real sumo. There are also hidden moves like suplexes and scrapbusters thrown in for fun. Use all the moves you learn in tournaments around the world to reach the peak of sumo and become a yokozuna. In ONE PLAYER mode, play eating or sparring mini-games to make your wrestler stronger and change his look. You can also use your own Mii™ character's face on your wrestler. In TWO PLAYER mode, take on another person using default wrestlers or the wrestlers that you have created. (Additional accessories are required for two-player mode and are sold separately.) Chow down, bulk up and fight on to become the strongest sumo wrestler ever.

RABBIDS LAB
Publisher: Ubisoft
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) - Cartoon Violence
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: A raving Rabbid is stuck inside the Wii Remote controller. Come play with him. First, try interacting with him by moving the Wii Remote or pressing the buttons and seeing how much he loves it. Once you've gotten to know the crazy guy, it's time to change his appearance in the Lab. Mess with his head and place seasonal accessories on him, or change his look entirely with the painting module. When you've made your raving Rabbid completely unique, you can take a photo and send it in a Wii™ message to show your Wii Friends (broadband Internet connection required).

The Magic Obelisk
Publisher: GAME ARTS Co., Ltd.
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) - Comic Mischief
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: The Magic Obelisk is an action-adventure game in which you become Popo, a light spirit. Your mission is to guide Lukus, a tree spirit, to each stage's goal while moving only within the shadow. You can help him do this by shining your light near the mysterious magic obelisks, allowing you to create and connect shadows to solve tricks and gimmicks along the way. Join Lukus as he travels through a light-filled realm filled with quirky creatures and spirits, trying to find the perfect spot to become a tree. Experience meaningful encounters and partings, climb hills, cross rivers and traverse a vast desert on your way to the very edge of the world.

Virtual Console

PilotWings
Original platform: Super NES™
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) - Mild Violence
Price: 800 Wii Points
Description: Join the Flight Club to take to the skies and experience a variety of aerial activities. Take off and pilot a biplane through rings along a predetermined flight path, or drift serenely in a hang glider, catching thermal currents to gain altitude. In either case, just be sure to stick the landing. Looking for more speed? Strap on the rocket belt to blast your way around an obstacle course. If that's not enough, reach maximum velocity as you tackle a skydiving lesson at 3,800 feet. Complete specific objectives within a set time limit to score points (and maybe even a bonus chance) and obtain certification in eight different lessons. Your goals will become more challenging, and weather conditions will make controlling your vehicle more difficult as you progress. If you succeed, you will be rewarded with the opportunity to pilot an attack helicopter on a daring rescue mission. It's time to earn your wings.

Nintendo DSiWare

The Oregon Trail
Publisher: Gameloft
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10 and Older) - Comic Mischief, Mild Cartoon Violence, Use of Tobacco
Price: 800 Nintendo DSi Points™
Description: Westward, ho! Your favorite pioneering adventure game takes you on an exciting, historic, side-scrolling adventure with your Nintendo DSi™ system. Take the Oregon Trail experience further than ever before with all of the decision-making and problem-solving fun of the original game plus additional challenges. Leave your mark on America's history. Take a picture of yourself at each landmark with the Nintendo DSi system's built-in camera. You'll have your portrait and party's name printed in the Daily Oregon Trail newspaper in the game. Play eight skill-based mini-games that will impact your resources: Hunting, Fishing, River Crossing, Rafting, Wagon Repairing, Telegraph, Berry Picking and Gold Panning. Random events faced by real pioneers - such as disease, bandits and hitchhikers - and side missions add more excitement to your westward trek.

SUDOKU SENSEI
Publisher: Hudson Entertainment
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Introducing 100 “Super Hard Puzzles” for the hardened sudoku veteran. All puzzles are skillfully designed for a level of satisfaction that computer-generated puzzles just can't offer. You can play through puzzles to learn about rules and controls in Tutorials mode. Other handy features include Write Mode and Temp Number for an easier, more enjoyable sudoku experience.

Glow Artisan
Publisher: Powerhead Games
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Solve mind-bending puzzles in this unique and colorful game. Use your wits and ingenuity to solve more than 100 puzzles and earn more than 300 medals. Play Time Trial, Randomizer and Multiplayer modes for an endless supply of new challenges. Create new puzzles with the built-in editor or use the Nintendo DSi Camera application to turn your photos into puzzles.

Master of Illusion™ Express: Psychic Camera
Publisher: Nintendo
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 200 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: Master of Illusion Express titles include mind-boggling magic tricks that you perform with your Nintendo DSi system. Learn the illusions, practice them and amaze your friends. Your audience will never look at your Nintendo DSi system the same way again after Master of Illusion Express: Psychic Camera proves that it has psychic powers. Astound others by taking their picture and revealing an item (such as a card, picture, letter or number) that they're thinking about.

Arcade Hoops Basketball
Publisher: Skyworks Interactive, Inc.
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 200 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: From Skyworks comes the slickest basketball game for the Nintendo DSi system. See how many baskets you can sink in a fast-moving 45 seconds, using only your stylus and, of course, your lightning-fast hand-eye coordination. Arcade Hoops features your choice of three rockin' soundtracks, state-of-the-art 3-D graphics and thrilling, high-speed game play for the most fun possible in under a minute. Advanced hoopsters can move on to the progressive level, where a moving basket provides an additional challenge - plus the chance to rack up even more points. For the real pros, there's 3 Point mode, where speed and accuracy are a must as you shoot “threes” from downtown.

Nintendo adds new titles to the Nintendo DSi Shop and the Wii Shop Channel at 9 a.m. Pacific time on Mondays. Users with broadband Internet access can redeem Wii Points or Nintendo DSi Points to download the games. Wii Points can be purchased in the Wii Shop Channel. Nintendo DSi Points can be purchased in the Nintendo DSi Shop. A Nintendo Points Card™ can be purchased at retail locations. All points from one Nintendo Points Card must be redeemed in either the Nintendo DSi Shop or the Wii Shop Channel. They are not transferable and cannot be divided between the two systems.

2010 brings an election for a new Metro President - current President David Bragdon is term-limited. Three very serious candidates are in the hunt for the May primary:

• Councilor Rex Burkholder - a 10-year Metro veteran and former chair of JPACT. Previously he founded the Bicycle Transportation Alliance.
• Bob Stacey - most recently Executive Director of 1000 Friends of Oregon, he has also served as Portland's Planning Director and in Congressman Blumenaur's DC office.
• Mayor Tom Hughes - recently retired as Mayor of Hillsboro

The winner of this race will have significant influence on transportation policy in the region, possibly for many years to come. While Portland Transport as a non-profit cannot endorse candidates, we can help educate voters.

I propose that Portland Transport create a questionnaire on transportation policy for this race and publish the responses.

What should we ask? Be specific!

[ overview ] December 18 marked the beginning of the month of Moharram. Shiites, and in particular Iranians, have been mourning the murder of their third Imam, Hossein, the quintessential martyr, since his death in the battle of Karbala on October 10, 680, which falls on Ashura, the 10th day of Moharram. Ashura has been commemorated for at least a thousand years, beginning probably in Baghdad, Iraq, in the 4th Islamic century. Tradition holds that Imam Hossein and 72 of his followers were slain on that day after fighting bravely with the much larger army of the Umayyad Caliph, Yazid ibn Moaaviyeh, which some historians have said was 100,000 men strong.

The murder of Imam Hossein, his friends, followers and members of his family by a Sunni Caliph is perhaps the main reason that Shiism is considered a rebellious sect in Islam. Because the Shiites have been a minority throughout the history of Islam, they have transformed the historical battle of Karbala to symbolize ideological confrontation with the ruling elite, and have used a powerful combination of actual events and legend to stir up great emotion; it has been an occasion to complain bitterly about their marginalization in much of the Islamic world and to demand their rights. They invoke Imam Hossein's famous quote that, "Every day is Ashura, and every land is Karbala."

In a sense, the battle still rages on. Currently there exists an internal strife in Yemen between the majority Shiite and the ruling Sunni minority. The uprising in Bahrain (1994-2000), another country in which the Sunni minority rules over the Shiite majority, began in November 1994 when security forces launched an attack on the Shiite community there. There has also always been friction between Saudi Arabia's majority Sunni and its Shiites, who make up 10 percent of the population. In Lebanon, the Shiites have used their grievances against other sects as a powerful motivating force to gain political power.

There is the other side of the coin. The well-known Hama massacre occurred on February 2, 1982, when the Syrian army attacked the town of Hama in Syria, and sealed it in order to put down a Sunni revolt led by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Syria was, and still is, ruled by the Alawite (Alawie) minority, an off-shoot of Shiism. Up to 40,000 people were killed, and most of the city was destroyed. [Note that about 30% of Turkey's population also belongs to the Alawite sect.] After the U.S. invasion of Iraq led to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, the non-Kurdish Sunnis (making up about about 20% of the population) fiercely fought the central government until they were defeated.

By 1845, Moharram commemorations spread as far as the Caribbean basin, when Muslim laborers from India went there. In fact, next to its annual carnival, Moharram is the most important event in Trinidad. In India, the Sunni and even the Hindus actively participate in many Moharram rituals.

In Iran, where the Shiites are in the majority, the battle of Karbala and the murder of Imam Hossein have taken on political significance for at least a century. This began during the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11), when gatherings to mourn the murder of Imam Hossein became political as well. The clerics began preaching that the oppressors -- the king and his cronies -- were similar to Imam Hossein's enemies. The commemoration of Ashura became so political during the reign of Reza Shah that he actually outlawed it during the 1930s.

This year promises to be no different. The Green Movement has vowed to use the day of Ashura -- Sunday, December 28 -- to stage peaceful demonstrations and showcase its strength. Given that the color green has a special meaning in Islam, and that Imam Hossein, an underdog in the Karbala battle, is considered a symbol of resistance against oppressors and absolute power, the demonstrations, if they materialize, will be hugely significant. As fate would have, the Islamic mourning ceremonies marking the 7th day of the passing of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri will also fall on Ashura, which will likely fuel the intensity, as it will be rich in symbolism and can resonate politically throughout the country.

This would not be the first time that the powerful mix of imagery, symbolism, events and legend is used to advance a political agenda. It has happened twice over the past half century, each time with great consequence.

Ashura 1963

The first time that Ashura was used to great effect was in 1963. Under pressure from the Kennedy administration to carry out reforms, on January 26, 1963, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi declared the so-called White Revolution. It was a program of reform consisting of (1) land reform, whereby large agricultural land was to be distributed among peasants working on them [the landowners were to be compensated]; (2) nationalization of the forests; (3) privatization of state-owned industries; (4) granting women the right to vote; (5) workers sharing profits in industry; and (6) a nationwide campaign against illiteracy. (On the face of it, the program was progressive. Whether it was a success is not the subject of this article.)

Land reform actually got under way under Dr. Ali Amini (1905-1992), who was Prime Minister from May 1961 to July 1962. He was pro-United States and a friend of President John F. Kennedy. The Shah had appointed him Prime Minister after being pressured by the United States. But he claimed the reforms as his own after Amini was forced to resign.

Land reform and women's suffrage were objected to by the traditional clerics. But it was the land reform [not granting voting rights to women, as some claim] that was most objectionable to them. The clergy thought that land would be taken away from the landowners without consent, which is forbidden by Islam. In addition, some clerics saw land reform as an attempt by the Shah to reduce their influence among the feudal landlords.

After consulting with other ayatollahs in Qom, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a harsh declaration denouncing the Shah and his plans. The Shah retaliated by moving tanks to Qom, and delivering a speech in which he said the ayatollahs were like a caste. It did not silence Ayatollah Khomeini.

In 1963, Ashura fell on June 3. [Because the Islamic calendar is lunar-based, Ashura falls on a different day each year on the solar calendar.] On that afternoon, Khomeini delivered a fiery sermon at the Feiziyeh seminary (where he was teaching), in which he drew parallels between Yazid and the Shah, and called him a "wretched, miserable man." Two days later, on June 5 (15 Khordad on the Iranian calendar), Khomeini was arrested.

The arrest sparked three days of large demonstrations throughout the country and hundreds were killed. That gave birth to the 15 Khordad Movement. As I explained in an earlier article, when I was a child, I personally witnessed some of the demonstrations in Bazaar, Tehran's commercial center. Ayatollah Khomeini was kept under house arrest for several months, and was eventually released in April 1964. The 15 Khordad Movement laid the groundwork for the 1979 Revolution.

In 1964 the Shah and his Prime Minister, Hassan-Ali Mansur (1923-1965), signed an agreement that granted U.S. military advisers and their families immunity from prosecution in Iran. The Majles [parliament] then ratified the agreement. The law became known as the Capitulation Law. In a fiery speech, Ayatollah Khomeini said,

They [the parliament] passed it [the agreement] without any shame, and the government shamelessly defended this scandalous measure. They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, or the marja' [source of emulation] of Iran, or the highest officials, no one will have the right to object.

The speech prompted the Shah to send Ayatollah Khomeini into exile, first to Turkey, on November 4, 1964, and later to Iraq. Mansur was assassinated on January 27, 1965, by Mohammad Bokharaei, a 17-year-old member of the Fadayan-e Islam [Devotees of Islam] group. It is believed that Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani provided the gun to Bokharaei. He and his three accomplices -- Haj Sadegh Amani, Reza Saffar Harandi, and Morteza Niknejad -- were executed.

It should be pointed out that after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979, the conservative clerics wanted to take away the right to vote from women, but he kept them from doing so. Ayatollah Khomeini also formed the so-called Hayat haaye Haft Nafareh [seven-member groups] to carry out land reform [which they did to some extent], but that too was later blocked by the same bloc of conservative clerics.

Ashura 1978

The second time Ashura was used to advance a political cause was in December 1978, when the Revolution had gained momentum. That year Ashura fell on December 11. The government of Prime Minister Jafar Sharif Emami (1910-1998), which had come to power on August 27, 1978, had failed to stem the growing wave of protests. The bloody crackdown on demonstrators on Friday, September 8, 1978 [known as Black Friday in Iran, during which up to 80 people had been killed by security forces], had created a fissure between the Shah and the opposition that was expanding by the day.

On Saturday, November 4, 1978, during demonstrations at the University of Tehran, several high school and university students had been killed. There were strikes all over the country, which left the nation paralyzed.

Two days later, Sharif Emami resigned. At noon that day, the Shah went on national television and radio and announced the appointment of a military government led by General Gholam-Reza Azhari who had a reputation for being a moderate military leader. The Shah promised the nation that he would address their grievances and hold free elections. He said that he "had heard your [the people's] revolutionary voice," and that

In the open political atmosphere, gradually developed these two recent years, you, the Iranian nation, have risen against cruelty and corruption. This revolution cannot but be supported by me, the Padeshah [King] of Iran.

However, insecurity has reached a stage where the independence of the country is at stake. Daily life is endangered and what is most critical, the lifeline of the country, the flow of oil, has been interrupted [a reference to the fact that the industry had gone on strike].

I tried to form a coalition government, but this has not been possible. Therefore, a temporary government has been formed to restore order and pave the way for a national [unity] government to carry out free elections very soon.

I am aware of the relation that has existed between political and economic corruption. I renew my oath to be protector of the Constitution and to make sure that past mistakes not be repeated and [be] made up for. I hereby give assurance that the government will do away with repression and corruption, and that social justice will be restored after the sacrifices you have made.

At the present juncture, the Imperial Army will fill its duties in accordance with its oaths. Calm must be restored with your coöperation. I invite the religious leaders to help restore calm to the only Shiite country in the world. I want political leaders to help save our Fatherland. The same goes for workers and peasants.

Let us think of Iran on the road against imperialism, cruelty, and corruption, along which I shall accompany you.

In effect, the Shah recognized the legitimacy of the Revolution. By pledging early free elections, he hoped to calm the nation and neutralize the opposition.

Many leading officials, including former Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda (1920-1979) and General Nematollah Nassiri (1911-1979), the former head of the dreaded SAVAK, the Shah's security and intelligence organization, were arrested [both were executed immediately after the Revolution in February 1979]. The Azhari government took on some taboo issues, such as an investigation into charges of corruption in the Shah's family. He also tried to restart the oil industry.

But Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in staying in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château at the time, denounced the Azhari government and called on the people to "broaden their opposition to the Shah and force him to abdicate." In a series of statements, he called for a campaign of large demonstrations during Moharram that was to begin on December 2.

On November 23, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a declaration called: "Moharram: the triumph of blood over the sword." The declaration was recorded and distributed in Iran through the network of mosques.

It began,

With the approach of Moharram, we are about to begin the epic month of heroism and self-sacrifice, the month in which blood triumphed over the sword, the month in which truth condemned falsehood for all eternity and branded the mark of disgrace upon the forehead of all oppressors and satanic governments, the month that has taught successive generations throughout history the path of victory over the dagger [or knife].

In particular, Ayatollah Khomeini targeted the days of Tasua and Ashura for large demonstrations. Tasua [meaning the 9th in Arabic language] is also commemorated because it was the day before the Karbala battle.

On November 28, the Azhari government banned "processions of any kind" during Moharram. Nevertheless, demonstrations took place in Tehran. Although the military government had imposed a curfew, it was violated. Oil production had dropped from its peak of 5.8 million to below 2 million barrels a day.

On December 2, the first day of Moharram, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets around Tehran's Shahyad Square (now called Azadi [freedom] square), to demand the removal of the Shah and return of Ayatollah Khomeini.

On December 6, Dr. Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the opposition National Front, was released from custody. He had been arrested after traveling to France to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini.

On December 8, Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari (1905-1986), a moderate and important marja' urged his followers at a press conference in Qom to avoid violence. There had been, at the last moment, a compromise. Working through former Prime Minister Ali Amini, the Shah and the military government had reached an agreement with Ayatollah Shariatmadari (considered the most important cleric living in Iran at that time), to avoid a violent showdown between the military and the people.

That deal seemed to signal that the moment had finally come to move toward re-establishing a true constitutional monarchy that would widely limit the role of the Shah. This would have been in keeping with the original intents of the 1906 Constitution, which the Shah had repeatedly violated. But the moment came too late. First, by then, Ayatollah Khomeini was not willing to settle for anything less than toppling the monarchy. Second, even Ayatollah Shariatmadari had hardened his position. He had indicated that he would turn up the pressure if major concessions were not made by the Shah. When asked when that would happen, he had replied, "It will be soon." Third, the Shah was not ready to relinquish most of his power. When he was forced to, it was too late.

That same day, December 8, the Azhari government announced that it had lifted the ban and would permit Moharram commemorations to take place. The next day, the government promised that except for a token presence along the path of the demonstrators, it would keep the army mostly in the northern parts of Teheran [where the Shah and his family lived].

Tasua fell on Sunday, December 10. It had snowed a few days leading up to that day, but all melted away. There was an ocean of demonstrators with no beginning or end in sight. People walked side-by-side with their fists punching the air. Most men were unshaven and many women wore the hejab, even if they did not believe in the Islamic dress code. Many carried carnations and walked up to onlooking soldiers and placed the flowers in the muzzle of their rifles. Many demonstrators kissed and hugged the soldiers. Most were chanting,

Death to the Shah!

Allah-o Akbar [God is great]! Khomeini our leader!

And, a banner read,

Martyrs are the heart of history, which is the famous quote by Dr. Ali Shariati (1933-1977), the distinguished sociologist and Islamic scholar.

The population of Tehran in 1978 was less than 5 million. At least two million people, and possibly many more, took part in the demonstrations, which means at least 40% of the entire population was out in a show of force. Similarly large demonstrations took place all over Iran. The demonstrators held hands, sang revolutionary songs, and held up banners with revolutionary slogans. There were pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini everywhere, even though it was still illegal for his posters to be held in public.

Above the crowd, an American-made helicopter hovered. It reportedly carried the Shah who was watching the demonstrations. He reportedly said, "Why have they [the people] turned against me?" In the afternoon of that day, he ordered the release of 120 political prisoners. But it was too little, too late.

The next day, Ashura, there were more large demonstrations in Tehran and elsewhere, but not as large as the day before. The organizers held the largest demonstrations on Tasua to surprise government forces. It was estimated that 6-9 million people demonstrated in Iran during Tasua and Ashura in 1978. Given that Iran's population was about 32 million at that time, the numbers were truly staggering.

At the end of each demonstration, a resolution with four demands was read aloud: The Shah's abdication; return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran; political freedom, and economic justice for all.

Were the demands ever met?

The Shah left Iran on January 16, 1979, but never actually abdicated. He passed away in exile on July 27, 1980, in Cairo, Egypt [he had been born in 1919]. His father Reza Shah (1878-1944) had also passed away in exile in Johannesburg, South Africa.

After Tasua and Ashura demonstrations, the military essentially lost its will to confront the people. It had become a foregone conclusion that the Shah had to leave the country. Every day more soldiers defected from the army and joined the revolutionaries.

On February 1, 1979, at 9:15 am, a chartered Air France jetliner landed at Tehran's Mehrabad airport. A victorious Ayatollah Khomeini stepped off the plane, holding the arm of a flight attendant for support. He dropped to his knees on the tarmac to kiss the soil of the land that he had left more than 14 years ago.

On February 9, 1979, at about 10:00 pm, a fight broke out between Guard-e Javidan [Immortal Guards], loyal to the Shah, and junior officers of Iran's Air Force who had declared their loyalty to Ayatollah Khomeini. He declared jihad on the loyal soldiers who were not willing to surrender. Other revolutionaries and defecting soldiers began to take over police stations and military installations, and distributed arms to the public.

On February 11, 1979, at 2:00 pm, the Supreme Military Council, led by Chief of Staff General Abbas Gharabaghi, declared itself "neutral in the current political disputes... in order to prevent further disorder and bloodshed." The Revolution had toppled the monarchy.

Ayatollah Khomeini passed away on June 3, 1989, in Tehran, leaving behind a theocracy, instead of a republic, which has now devolved into a repressive military junta headed by a cleric.

The other two demands of the demonstrators of Tasua and Ashura in 1978 -- political freedom and economic justice for all -- never materialized.

Copyright © 2009 Tehran Bureau

Transportation for America is hiring a field organizer for Oregon.

The position will be hosted at 1000 Friends of Oregon.

Responsibilities include:

• Convene and provide staff support for a diverse coalition of partners and allies.
• Provide assistance with local education and outreach efforts of Oregon groups.
• Develop educational tools and materials on campaign goals and issues (in coordination with other local coalition partners and other T4America campaign teams).
• Engage in policy advocacy, media outreach and organizing public events.
• Support and strengthen creative partnerships and grassroots transportation reform campaigns in Portland, Eugene and other Oregon cities.
• Build and manage a powerful field operation to mobilize "grasstops" supporters of campaign, including local business leaders, environmental organizations, labor unions, the real estate sector, equity and health groups, elected officials and others.
• Expand the capacity of local and state campaign partners to engage with state and federal leaders on transportation and other related policies.
• Analyze and translate federal policy goals and "best practices" in transportation reform into a Oregon-specific context through outreach to local groups and allies.

Unless some breaking news comes along, this will be my final pre-holiday post, so I'd like to take this opportunity to extend wishes to all our readers for a joyous and safe holiday season!

See you on Monday.

The bowl season is upon us in college football. Starting Dec. 19, 2009, all the way to January 7, 2010, the bowls will be played.

That is 34 games over 20 days and the last chance to see college football until next September. So now it is time to preview the bowls and make some predictions.

With so many games over such a long time, this will be broken up into four parts. The first part will be bowl games from Dec. 19 to Christmas Eve.

Next will be part two will break down bowls from the day after Christmas to December, 30. Part three will be from New Year's Eve to New Year's Day. The final part will be bowls from the second day of the New Year to the BCS championship game.

So the following is the first six bowl games before Christmas. I will have a preview of the game and then my pick to win the game.

Saturday, Dec. 19

New Mexico Bowl: Albuquerque, N.M.

Wyoming Cowboys (6-6) vs. Fresno State Bulldogs (8-4)

This is the first time the Mountain West Conference and the Western Athletic Conference will match up this bowl season.

The Cowboys needed to win their final game of the year against Colorado State just to get into this game. This team has played good teams tough in the first half and faded in the second half.

First year coach Dave Christensen will be happy he got his team into a bowl game but will have to find away to shore up his rushing defense. That defense allowed 170 yards per game this season.

Wyoming is going bowling for the first time since 2004. The Cowboys will be led by Mountain West Freshman of the Year Austyn Carta-Samuels.

The Bulldogs have been tested plenty this season. Fresno State has lost to two undefeated teams and their other two losses were against teams going to a bowl game.

This team played Wisconsin to overtime and Cincinnati escaped with an eight-point win. The Bulldogs also feature one of the best players most in the country have not heard of, Ryan Mathews.

Mathews was on pace for 2,000 yards until he suffered an injury against Nevada and missed the Louisiana Tech game. For the season, Mathews averaged 151 yards per game and should get fed the ball all day long against the Broncos.

Pick: Fresno State

Mathews should run wild on for the Bulldogs on a poor Wyoming rush defense.

St. Petersburg Bowl: St. Petersburg, Fla.

Central Florida Knights (8-4) vs. Rutgers Scarlet Knights (8-4)

After Wyoming and Fresno State, the Big East and Conference-USA will mix it up in a post season game in Florida. Rutgers is going bowling for the fifth straight year and UCF is going bowling for the third time in five years.

The Scarlet Knights will lean on running back Joe Martinek to carry the load. Rutgers freshman quarterback Tom Savage might be the key to winning this game if he can get on track.

Savage has struggled at times this season, only completing 52.3 percent of his passes with 12 touchdowns and six interceptions. If Martinek cannot run on the stiff UCF rush defense, it will fall on Savage to move the ball.

Rutgers coach Greg Schiano will try to use this trip into the Sunshine State to showcase his program. The Scarlet Knights have been putting up billboards for years and now get a chance to play a bowl game in Florida.

This could be considered a home game for Central Florida and coach George O’Leary. The Knights only have to travel 90 miles for their bowl game after missing out on last year.

UCF will use their good rush defense led by Bruce Miller, the C-USA defensive player of the year and fifth in the county in sacks with 12. Offensively, the Knights will want to run the ball with Brynn Harvey who rushed over 1,000 yards this season.

Rutgers will try to stop the ground game of UCF and force senior quarterback Brett Hodges to win the game. Hodges has had a tough season, throwing for 15 touchdowns and 11 interceptions but has completed 61.1 percent of his passes.

Pick: Central Florida

The home crowd should help lead the Knights to a bowl victory over the team from New Jersey.

Sunday, Dec. 20

R + L Carriers New Orleans Bowl: New Orleans, La.

Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders (9-3) vs. Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles (7-5)

C-USA takes the field for the second time this bowl season but against the Sun Belt Conference. Southern Mississippi is going bowling for the 12th time in 13 seasons and Middle Tennessee is making their second bowl trip since joining the FBS.

The Blue Raiders are enjoying their best season since moving to Division I in 1999 and are on a six-game winning streak. Things turned around for Middle Tennessee when coach Rick Stockstill hired offensive guru Tony Franklin.

The spread offense has been run perfectly by quarterback Dwight Dasher this season. Dasher has averaged nearly 300 yards passing per game and has thrown 21 touchdowns and 14 interceptions.

The Blue Raiders will have to win this game with good defense. They might have the edge with Sun Belt Conference Defensive Player of the year Chris McCoy.

McCoy had 22 tackles for a loss and seven sacks and he gets help in the secondary from Marcus Udell who had seven interceptions. They will need all of the defense they can muster against a team with the offensive firepower Southern Miss has.

The Golden Eagles have not had problems scoring points, even after Austin Davis was lost for the season and replaced by Martevious Young. As the starter, Young has thrown 12 touchdowns and just one interception.

Still the Golden Eagles have plenty of weapons for a team that averaged 33 points a game this season. One of those weapons, DeAndre Brown, broke his leg in this game last year.

Southern Miss will also have running back Damion Fletcher one final time as he tries to become the ninth player to rush for 1,000 yards in four all four seasons. Fletcher only needs 63 yards to reach the milestone.

Pick: Southern Mississippi

The Golden Eagles will win in what could be the highest scoring bowl game this season.

Tuesday, December 22^nd Bowl Game

Maaco Las Vegas Bowl: Las Vegas, NV

Brigham Young Cougars (10-2) vs. Oregon State Beavers (8-4)

The Mountain West makes its second bowl appearance while the Pac-10 makes its first showing. This is Brigham Young’s fifth straight trip to the Las Vegas bowl and Oregon State has won five straight bowls.

BYU and Oregon State are connected in several ways heading into this game. First, Cougars head coach Bronco Mendenhall played for the Beavers in college.

Next, BYU leading rusher Harvey Unga is the cousin of two Oregon State freshmen players. The Cougars will be led for the final time by senior quarterback Max Hall.

Hall will be joined for the final time by his brother-in-law and star tight end Dennis Pitta. The key to this game could be the Cougars 23^rd nationally ranked defense.

Oregon State has its own family affair with the Rodgers brothers leading the way for the Beavers. James Rodgers the top receiver on the team and Jacquizz Rodgers moving the ball on the ground.

The key to the Beavers offense could be how well Sean Canfield plays in this game. Both Canfield and Jacquizz were named first-team All-Pac-10 at their positions.

Oregon State head coach Mike Riley will have to get his team over the disappointment of not winning the conference title after a loss to Oregon. The Beavers and the Cougars are the first two ranked teams to play in this bowl game.

Pick: Oregon State

The Beavers offense will be too much for the Cougars to handle and Canfield and the Rodgers brothers will have a huge day.

Wednesday, December 23^rd Bowl Game

San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl: San Diego, CA

Utah Utes (9-3) vs. California Golden Bears (8-4)

This is the second bowl matchup between the Mountain West and Pac-10 conference. It is also a game between two teams that were both beaten by the Oregon Ducks.

Last season Utah was the darling of college football after beating Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. This season, saw their 16 game winning streak was snapped by the Ducks in the third game of the season.

The Utes have won eight straight bowl games and four of those wins have come under Kyle Whittingham who replaced Urban Meyer. Utah can play either freshman Jordan Wynn, if he is healthy or junior Terrance Cain at quarterback.

On the ground Utah will depend on the conference’s leading rusher Eddie Wide to carry the load. Wide should get plenty of chances got gain yards against a Cal defense that gives up 118 yards a game.

The Bears started this season with dreams of their first Pac-10 title since 1958 but blowout losses to Oregon and USC ended their hopes. Under Jeff Tedford, Cal has reached a bowl game for the seven straight years and has won the last four.

California will have to win this game without their Heisman candidate Jahvid Best who is still recovering from a concussion suffered against Oregon State. Leading the ground game in Best’s absence will be Shane Vereen.

The key for the Bears will be the play of quarterback Kevin Riley who has been intercepted four times in his last four games. Utah led the Mountain West with 15 interceptions this season so Riley must make good decisions.

Pick: Utah

The Utes defense and rushing game runs their bowl winning streak to nine straight games.

Thursday, December 24^th Bowl Game

Sheraton Hawai’i Bowl: Honolulu, HI

Southern Methodist Mustangs (7-5) vs. Nevada Wolf Pack (8-4)

C-USA takes on the WAC in paradise on Christmas Eve. This is the first bowl game for SMU since 1984 and the “Death Penalty” the NCAA gave them in 1985.

The game will also be a homecoming of sorts for June Jones who left Hawaii to take over the Mustangs two years ago. Jones wanted to reach this bowl game as a tribute to friend and special teams coach Frank Gansz.

SMU will use the run-and-shoot offense Jones used to get the Warriors to a BCS bowl game. The offence has found balance this season with Shawnbrey McNeal, a transfer from Miami, leading the ground game.

The Mustangs have played well after starting quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell was injured against Houston. Stepping in for Mitchell has been freshman quarterback Kyle Padron.

Defense besides Padron will be the key in this game for SMU because Nevada is the best rushing team in the NCAA. The Wolf Pack set a NCAA record with three 1,000 rushers this season.

Nevada was lead by Vai Taua with a team high 1,345 yards but the key to this offense is junior quarterback Colin Kaepernick who had 1,160 rushing yards and passed for 1,875 yards.

The pistol offense installed by hall of fame coach Chris Ault needs Kaepernick to make the good decisions to make it go. The Wolf Pack can also turn to Luke Lippincott, who rushed for 1,034 yards, as well.

This game could rival the New Orleans bowl in points scored. One thing is for sure the team that plays the best defense will win this game. SMU with Jones as coach should be the home crowd favorite.

Pick: Nevada

The Wolf Pack should be able to control the game with their rushing attack and wear down the SMU defense in the process.

This concludes the first part of our 2009-2010 bowl preview and predictions. Be sure to check back as we cover the bowls that will be played before the start of the New Year.

I hope everyone enjoys the games and that every game is close and down to the final play. I also hope that everyone who reads this has a Merry Christmas and their family and friends to share the holidays with.

As the leaders, and eyes, of the world converge on
Copenhagen, questions are swirling like storm clouds. Will developed countries agree and commit to
a meaningful greenhouse gas emissions reduction target? Will Those Most Responsible pony up some
serious dough for a “Green Fund” to help those most affected develop clean
energy supplies and climate adaptation strategies? Will Sen. Inhofe (R-Okla.) challenge Al Gore to an
arm-wrestling match in the middle of Rådhuspladsen, the Danish capital’s
gorgeous City Hall Square?

Most important, will the 115 or so world leaders
gathered this week in the Danish capital come to some kind of substantive agreement,
or at least an agreement to agree in the not-too-distant future? Will anything come out of these talks other
than talk?

Climate leaders in cities and metropolitan areas
across the U.S. aren’t holding their breath. Sure, they’ve got one eye on Denmark, but the other is focused on a much
more local (and palpable) prize: Significantly reducing their own carbon
footprints—and working to create good, green jobs and a vibrant, low-carbon
economy along the way.

To these folks, “Climategate” is nothing more than the
predictable (and yet still quite annoying) chatter from the cheap seats. They know that climate change is real, not
because they’ve read about it in some report or science magazine, but because
they see it unfolding before their eyes, in the form of dwindling water
supplies, more frequent heat waves, overtaxed drainage systems, and a dizzying
(and frightening) array of other impacts already wreaking havoc on their people
and their economies. So they’re not
watching from the bleachers, sipping Carlsberg, and hoping for the best. They’re down on the field, advancing the ball
against fourth-and-long odds.

Take Kansas City, for
example, where the city government and its partners are busy creating a “Green
Impact Zone” aimed at transforming a blighted, 25-acre section of the community
into a model of sustainable, energy-efficient and equitable urban
redevelopment. The Zone is a distressed and historically underserved
150-block area within Kansas City’s urban core that’s been officially
designated for coordinated reinvestment and revitalization. The city is collaborating with the
Mid-America Regional Council, Kansas City Power & Light, the University of
Missouri, and a host of other nonprofit, business, and neighborhood
organizations; they are combining several different heretofore uncoordinated
streams of federal stimulus money to fund the project, which will include
weatherizing every home within the Zone that needs it, installing a smart grid
system, building a bus rapid transit network, and providing comprehensive job
training and placement services to unemployed people living within the Zone, so
that they can do much of the work generated by the project.

Portland’s Clean
Energy Works is another great example of an
innovative and integrated approach to increasing energy efficiency, saving
money, reducing climate pollution, and creating good, green jobs. Like many cities, Portland is ramping up its
efforts to significantly increase the energy efficiency of their residential
and commercial buildings, which nation-wide use about 70 percent of the electricity
load and produce more than 40 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. Using federal stimulus money as seed funding,
the City of Portland and its key partners—Multnomah County, Portland General
Electric, Shorebank Enterprise Cascadia, the Energy Trust of Oregon, and the
nonprofit Green for All—have established a revolving loan fund that will
provide low-interest loans to homeowners to finance energy efficiency audits
and measures such as new insulation or the installation of a high-efficiency
furnace or water heater. Participants
will pay off the loans over time, via their utility bills. The initial goal of the pilot program is to
retrofit 500 homes, but the longer-term target is 100,000. To ensure a coherent and equitable approach
to the job creation and workforce development elements of the program, the
Portland City Council recently approved a Community Workforce Agreement signed
by local businesses and labor unions. Among other things, the agreement requires that 80 percent of the workers come
from the local workforce, and that 30 percent are people of color, women, or low-income
residents.

Other cities are
experimenting with a different approach to helping property owners overcome one
of the major barriers to retrofitting their homes and businesses to increase
energy efficiency and save money: lack of funding for the up-front costs of
efficiency measures such as insulation and window replacement, even in cases
where the payback period is relatively short. Several cities are creating clean energy financing districts to help homeowners overcome that barrier. These programs give property owners an
opportunity to borrow money to increase the energy efficiency of their
buildings, or to install clean energy systems such as solar panels, and to
repay the loan over 20 years via their property tax bills. Property owners opt in voluntarily and pay
little if any up-front cost. And since
the energy improvement stays with the property, the tax obligation does as
well. This model, called Property Assessed
Clean Energy was first
piloted by the City of Berkeley to finance the installation of solar panels on
homes. Now it’s being replicated or
considered by many other cities across the country—from San Francisco, Calif. to
Annapolis, Md.—to finance energy efficiency as well as small renewable energy
retrofit projects.

Along with buildings,
transportation sources—cars, trucks, buses, and the like—are one of the top
two sources of climate pollution in most U.S. cities, and in the nation as a whole. Many metropolitan regions around the country
are working hard to shrink this segment of their carbon footprints, as well,
for example by shifting land-use policies and major infrastructure investments
to discourage sprawl and encourage the development of compact and relatively
climate-friendly urban communities, in which walking, biking, and public
transportation is easier, safer, and cheaper. The Sacramento Blueprint is one of the best examples. The six-county Sacramento Council of
Governments (SACOG) led an intensive, three-year process to develop the
Blueprint, using state-of-the-art GIS-based data analysis and mapping to help
the region visualize the myriad costs (economic, environmental, and social) of
sprawl and rally around a “smart growth” vision and strategy. The goal of the Blueprint, adopted by the
SACOG Board of Directors in 2004, is to reduce the amount of driving per
household by 8 percent compared to 2005 levels, which will translate into a
per-household reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of about 12 percent. And it appears to be working. Between 2004 and 2007, the number of multi-family
housing projects increased by more than 500 percent, while the number of single-family
houses on lots of 5,500 square feet or more decreased by more than 20 percent. The Blueprint has become a model for other
metropolitan areas, and inspired pioneering state legislation in California
that requires Metropolitan Planning Organizations to set greenhouse gas
emissions targets and develop a Sustainable Community Strategy to meet
them.

Atlanta is another example of
a fast-growing region that is making great strides to rein in sprawl and
develop more climate-friendly land-use and transportation systems. Just last year, the Atlanta City Council
unanimously approved Connect Atlanta, the city’s first comprehensive transportation
plan. The goal is nothing short of
transforming their historically highway-dominated transportation system,
designed mostly to facilitate the flow of motor vehicles between the city and
its suburbs, into a more diverse network of roads that also serves the mobility
needs of people within the city, for example by better-connecting the urban
core with the neighborhoods that surround it.
A series of seven community visioning workshops held throughout that
guided the development of Connect Atlanta which calls for downsizing some
streets so that they are more conducive to neighborhood quality-of-life,
building 200 miles of bike lanes, and adding 95 miles of rail and
high-frequency bus transit. The Livable
Cities Initiative, administered by the 10-county Atlanta Regional Commission,
promotes implementation of Connect Atlanta by providing community planning
grants and allocating federal transportation funding to redevelopment projects
that channel growth into the urban centers and away from undeveloped
areas.

Local leaders and
practitioners recognize that solving the global climate crisis will require not
just government action, but the ultimate team effort. So many cities and towns across the country
are coming up with creative, effective, and fun ways to engage their homeowners
and businesses in the climate challenge. The Energy Smackdown is a great example.
The brainchild of the Boston-based BrainShift Foundation, the Energy
Smackdown is a sort of green edition of the reality TV show “The Biggest
Loser.” It pits teams of households in
three Massachusetts communities (Arlington, Cambridge, and Medford) against each
other in a friendly competition to see which town can make the biggest energy
reduction over a 12-month period. Participants
get free advice from energy experts, including a comprehensive home energy and
lifestyle evaluation. Events include a
Light Bulb Challenge, a Smart Transit Challenge, and a “Locavore Banquet,” in
which the teams prepare and serve climate-friendly, full-course meals using
only locally sourced ingredients.

The 30 households
participating in the recently completed second season of Energy Smackdown
reduced their electricity use by an average of 14 percent. The top three households
reduced electricity usage  73 percent, 37 percent, and
28 percent over the 12 months. Local, regional,
and national media published or broadcast a total of 22 stories about the
Energy Smackdown, and a seven-part video series now in production will be
distributed via community access television as well as on the Internet. In addition to notoriety, cost savings, and
the warm feeling that comes from doing the right thing and inspiring neighbors
to do the same, the winners get great prizes provided by local businesses.

These are just a few of the climate innovations
underway in cities, towns, and metropolitan areas across America. Do we need a new international agreement that
commits nations to work together to solve the global climate crisis? No question. Do we need strong national climate protection policies and programs,
especially in high-emitting countries such as China, the U.S., and India? Absolutely. But local climate action is an essential ingredient, as well. Cities and towns consume two-thirds of the
world’s energy and produce more than 70 percent of its climate pollution, according to
the International Energy Agency. So it’s
easy to do the math: we don’t meet the global climate challenge without
creating dramatically more energy-efficient and less carbon-intensive
cities.

The good news is that a growing number of U.S. cities
get it; more than 1,000 mayors are participating in the U.S. Mayors Climate
Protection Agreement, initiated by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels back on Kyoto
Protocol enactment day (Feb. 15, 2005). They get that, while climate disruption is a global phenomenon, its
impacts are local. They get that local
solutions—from building codes that require more energy-efficient buildings to
land-use policies that increase reliance on public transportation, biking, and
walking—are not only readily available, but highly attractive on a many
levels. They get that the opportunities
for their communities are perhaps as great as the stakes are high.

So, while the ears of local climate practitioners may
be half-listening for a promising peep or two out of the Bella Center this
week, they’re keeping their noses exactly where they need to be: to the
grindstone. They aren’t waiting for hope—they’re creating it.

Spread the news on what the føck is going on in Copenhagen with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, or smoke signals.

Related Links:

Two moves by the U.S. and China that could unlock the Copenhagen chess game

Copenhagen cops cast pall over the city

Naomi Klein on Climate Justice Action

And now, regular reader Foster Keats gives his predictions AND renames the various bowls to his own anti-establishment liking:

It’s bowl season, my friends. Time to put those novels down, send the wives & kids to bed, and hunker down with non-stop football every day & night of the week until early January. You may live in New Jersey & can’t even point to New Mexico on a map, but HELL, Fresno St & Wyoming is about to come on the tube, live from Al, Alber, Alberker… that big town in New Mexico. And who wouldn’t be interested in Ohio U and Marshall when you have 23 points of confidence placed on the Bobcats, plus water cooler bragging rights in your office pool. And to salute all those hard-working companies that have spent so much of their vast profits to place their name on these delicious matchups, I have decided to give them some of my own, personal added exposure… In some cases, I couldn’t decide which one I liked better, so I put in multiple choices for your holiday entertainment… enjoy!!!

New Mexico Bowl
The Got Meth? Bowl or The AMC’s Breaking Bad Bowl: Fresno St 31 Wyoming 18

St Petersburg Bowl
The Why Would They Put The Salvador Dali Museum in Our Ghetto Town Bowl: Rutgers 27 UCF 15

R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl
The We Track Your Shoddy Poisonous Chinese Imports Bowl or The Shouldn’t We Be Moving People OUT of New Orleans Bowl: Southern Miss 30 MTSU 23

MAACO Las Vegas Bowl
The Even Burt Reynolds Stop Advertising Our $200 Shitty Paint Jobs Bowl or The Why The Hell Do We Always Get a Mormon School Who Never Gambles Bowl: Oregon St 37 BYU 24

San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl
The Who Outside of San Diego Could Ever Use Our Bank So Why Advertise It? Bowl or The Cheap Ugly Holiday Flower That You Buy Your Great Aunt Instead of Getting Her a REAL Gift Bowl: Utah 30 Cal 17

Sheraton Hawaii Bowl
The At Least Our Hotels Aren’t Synonymous With Party Girl Whores Bowl: Nevada 66 SMU 55

Little Caesar’s Pizza Bowl
The Has Anyone You Know Eaten One of Our Small Italian Toon Pies in the Last 20 Years Bowl: Ohio U 23 Marshall 13

Meineke Car Care Bowl
The You Need a New ‘Johnson Rod’, It’ll Cost You $500 Bowl: UNC 28 Pitt 20

Emerald Bowl
The We’re About Nuts, Not Gems or Colors or Isles or The Wizard of Oz Bowl or
The Isn’t Seattle Nicknamed The Emerald City So Why Did We Name Our Bowl This??? Bowl: USC 33 Boston College 6

Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl
The Muzak City Bowl, Sponsored by a Name Your Kids Always Giggle At: Clemson 40 Kentucky 17

AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl
The We’d Rather Sponsor a Game in Shreveport Than Do a 4-Hour Infomercial at 3am Bowl: UGA 31 Texas A&M; 30

EagleBank Bowl
The 15,000 at a Football Game is Still Better Than Any Baseball Crowd All Year Bowl or The Once We Saw Who is Playing Here We Moved It To a Real Football Stadium Bowl: UCLA 27 Temple 13

Champs Sports Bowl
The Discount Athletic Supporter & Non-Licensed Merchandise Headquarters Bowl: Wisconsin 27 Miami 17

Roady’s Humanitarian Bowl
The We Don’t Arrest Lot Lizards in Our Parking Lots Because We Care About The Small Business Owners Bowl: Idaho 37 Bowling Green 34

Pacific Life Holiday Bowl
The We Let Japanese Whalers Kill Our Mascot For $20,000 So We Could Pay Our Rent Bowl: Nebraska 17 Arizona 9

Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl
The We Don’t Build Sturdy Helicopters Anymore Because They’re Just Gonna Get Shot Down in Afghanistan Anyway Bowl: Houston 48 Air Force 33

Brut Sun Bowl
The At Least We Don’t Smell Like Williams Lectric Shave Bowl or The We Are Here To Mask The Stench of The Rio Grande River Bowl: Oklahoma 38 Stanford 23

Texas Bowl
The We Forgot To Pay a Marketing Company To Think Us Up A Name So This is All We Got Bowl: Mizzou 24 Navy 19

Insight Bowl
The We Do Something Technology-Wise That Even WE Can’t Explain Bowl: Minnesota 27 Iowa St 24

Chick-fil-A Bowl
The You Can’t Get Our Greasy Chicken Sandwiches on Sundays Bowl: Va Tech 23 Tennessee 10

Outback Bowl
The No One Can Better Grasp The Concept of Aussie Food Like Middle Florida Restaurateurs Bowl or
The We Put Your Salad Dressing Underneath Your Salad To Further Confuse Your Knowledge Of Aussie Culture Bowl: Auburn 30 NW 17

Konica Minolta Gator Bowl
The When Does Our Sponsorship Contract Expire So We Can Flee Jacksonville Like The Rest Bowl: WV 27 F$U 23

Capital One Bowl
The We’ll Give a Credit Card To Anyone So We Can Further Add To This Country’s Debt Problem Bowl: LSU 21 Penn St 20

Rose Bowl presented by Citi
The Now That a Bank Sponsors Us, All Our Flowers Are Marked Up To Valentine’s Day Prices Bowl or
The Does Anyone Watch Our Parade Anymore? Bowl: Oregon 33 Ohio St 18

Allstate Sugar Bowl
The We Have Pedro Cerrano Doing Our Commercials, So Screw You!! Bowl: Florida 41 Cincinnati 13

International Bowl
The What’s This All Abooot, Eh?? Take Off, You Hoser!! Bowl: Northern Illinois 27 South Florida 21

Papajohns.com Bowl
The We Won’t Deliver Pizza To This Neighborhood But We’ll Sponsor a Bowl Game Here Bowl: UConn 24 USC 18

AT&T; Cotton Bowl Classic
The Losing 100,000 Landlines a Day Doesn’t Matter B/C We Are Getting People Back With The iPhones Bowl: Okkie St 30 Ole Piss 23

Autozone Liberty Bowl
The Nothing Says More About Liberty in This Country Than The City of Memphis Bowl or
The You Can Work On Your Cars In Our Parking Lot, We’ve Got Plenty of Kitty Litter Bowl: Arkansas 27 East Carolina 17

Valero Alamo Bowl
The Please Don’t Confuse Us With Enron Or That Oil Company That Bush Bankrupted Back When He Was A Cokehead Bowl: Texas Tech 50 Michigan St 23

Tostitos Fiesta Bowl
The Don’t Blame Us If Your Bag of Our Chips Is All Crushed Into Little Pieces, It’s Piggy Wiggly’s Fault Bowl: TCU 26 Boise St 24

FedEx Orange Bowl
The Sorry The Government Make Us Crackdown On Letting You Ship Your Weed To Your Ex College Roommate Bowl: Georgia Tech 31 Iowa 20

GMAC Bowl
The We Forgot How To Make a Decent Automobile But Still Have Enough Cash To Sponsor a Game in Lovely Mobile Bowl or The We’re Still Gonna Fly To Mobile Anyway Because We’re Afraid Of The Red Necks Along I-65 Bowl: Central Michigan 47 Troy 41

BCS National Championship Game
The Didn’t We Already Sponsor a Game in This Stadium So Why Are We Doing It Again?? Oh, That’s Right, the $$$ Bowl or The This Is As Close As You Numb Nuts Will Ever Get To Seeing a Playoff Bowl: Alabama 27 Texas 13

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