Washed It!

His white shirt pressed, the chef glides through the crowd like a ship in full sail, checking tables, nodding to waiters. His world is full of hurry but he is not rushed. He sits down in the shade, wiping his brow amid a lunchtime crowd of gunrunners, clan elders, beggars and bankers.

They drift down unnamed roads toward his tables, the air sweet with meat, crushed vegetables, sprigs of spearmint. Scores of diners at a time cram elbow to elbow slurping and scooping at the edge of town, where big trucks haul white stone down from the mountains.

They know Abdulkarim Harazi has three wives, 18 children, a worn dagger and the humor of a man not done in by adversity. When he speaks, his customers, sopping broth with soft bread, listen, knowing that no matter how circuitous or embellished the tale, there’ll be wisdom waiting at the end.

“You handle a big family with justice,” says Harazi, pausing the way he does, eyes bright with mischief. “Justice means sleeping with one wife one night and another wife the next. This brings balance. Justice can’t control some things, though, like the passion of the heart.”

Harazi’s fires spit blue flames and hum like storms, searing blackened bowls filled with a traditional meat dish called fasha and a stew known as saltah. Thick with chilies, herbs, onions, potatoes, coriander and maybe a speck of cilantro, the meals bubble and cool beneath conversations of impatient men.

“Quality and cleanliness are the keys” to a fine meal, Harazi says.

His waiters have blistered fingers and gold-trimmed caps. From sunrise to just before dusk, they serve 1,300 pounds of beef and 660 pounds of vegetables to 4,000 diners at the Fakhi restaurant. Nobody rests, not the ladle men, nor the dicers, knives chopping, oil hissing at the culinary crossroads of the capital, where, for a brief moment and a few dollars, businessmen sit with junkmen for a taste that’s the same to everyone.

The main floor is shaded and dim, the tables long. Finding a seat requires cunning and swiftness and dodging men with quick hands. Some have guns, most have daggers. Outside, down steps faded by sunlight, more tables are lined beneath narrow shelters and there’s a feeling of an army encamped beneath the hills circling the city. From the road, amid clatter and the glow of fires, the word is that eating lunch anywhere else would be a pitiful miscalculation.

The men — not a woman in sight — speak of private misfortunes and national troubles. A land of deserts, rock ridges and sea coves, Yemen is both beautiful and tormented. Rebellions rattle north and south, Al Qaeda fighters roam the outlands and the Americans are talking about missile strikes and the cost of terror. Poorest country in Arab world, that’s what they keep saying, a place of thin wallets and drought. Here, though, you polish your spoon, stay away from the flame and eat.

“It’s simple,” says Harazi. “The cost of living is too high and the country is too unstable. It’s all about food and worry these days. There’s no hope because you can’t see anyone improving around you. I try to do the best for my children. Education, they must have that.”

He’s a solid man with thick hands and black stubble, settling into his chair like a priest hearing confessions. He knows that life needs places like this restaurant, reliable and intimate as home but without home’s predictability. You never know who might pull up on a motorcycle or amble in from the fringes. Harazi’s eyes gather them all, watching, ever watching.

By midafternoon the men are restless, waiting to dip into crinkly bags of shiny narcotic khat leaves that will mellow them out until way past sunset. It’s a ritual as common as sleeping or waking. Nearly everyone at the restaurant finishes lunch and chews khat, cheeks bulging, eyes calm, the world suddenly fixable.

“Khat makes you forget about things,” says Harazi. “Khat gives you many ideas, but behind them is no planning.”

He laughs.

Wheels spin through gravel; a tribal leader in an SUV arrives in the parking lot, draped by dust and a well-armed entourage. Diners pause. No shots fired. Spoons resume. The leader, kissing cheeks, slapping backs, finds a seat.

“Look at that,” Harazi says, “Barack Obama doesn’t have as many bodyguards.”

“How many employees do you have?” someone asks.

Harazi looks around and whispers.

“One hundred, but if the taxman comes, only 20.”

Food for thought at one culinary crossroads in Yemen

Autobiography of Mark Twain

Volume 1

Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, et al.

University of California Press: 738 pp., $34.95

Having created a quintessentially American brand of humor and style of literature, Mark Twain (1835-1910) can now add to his myriad accomplishments the title of America’s first blogger. No matter that the “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” edited by a team led by Harriet Elinor Smith, weighs in at more than 5,000 pages. Volume One, covering the period from 1870 to 1906, and clocking in at a bit over 700 pages (including 200 pages of notes), is being published to coincide with Twain’s 175th birthday, Nov. 30.

But what a blog it is: A prose paean to Twain’s enormous energy level, his incessant need to express himself, and, on a parallel track, his unwavering narcissism. He rejected traditional means of orderly exposition in favor of creating a freewheeling record of his thoughts, unrestrained and unfiltered except by the King — himself.

No American author has ever captured the imagination the way that Twain did and continues to do a century after his death at 74. (Average life expectancy for men at the time was 47.) He was the first American global celebrity, with his signature claiming a higher price than President Roosevelt’s (to Twain’s delight, since he did not much care for Teddy). His great accomplishment in creating a distinct American sense of self and attitude is well described by Charles Kuralt: “If I had to say as much about America as I possibly could in only two words, I would say these two words: ‘Huck Finn.’”

Composing his mammoth “Autobiography” took Twain, on and off, more than 35 years of a life that included much satisfying success as well as devastating losses. He started writing installments the same year he married Olivia Langdon, in 1870, when he was 35. His first effort described the land investment his father had made, a purchase that weighed upon Twain like a millstone due to the annual taxes he had to pay after his father’s death. (In an ironic twist, after the land was sold, oil was discovered there.) While sustaining such a self-focus over such a long time would be an improbable passion for most mere mortals, Twain, despite his extremely modest beginnings in Florida, Mo., was not a humble guy. Indeed, he deemed his accomplishments so numerous and spectacular that by the end of his life he found the best analogy was comparing himself with Halley’s Comet: “The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”

Never one to rest for any prolonged period of time, by the time of his death, Twain had managed to cross the Atlantic 29 times, completed an around-the-world lecture tour at age 59, written more than 50,000 letters, scores of short stories, some 3,000 newspaper and magazine articles and more than 30 books.

Twain’s “Autobiography” offers a m

Roxanne Brummell has thrived in what many consider the toughest new testing ground for teachers in the nation.

The fifth-grade teacher in Washington, D.C., earned a “highly effective” rating under the district’s controversial system that rewards — and sometimes fires — teachers based in part on their students’ progress on standardized tests. In just seven months, she helped boost her students’ reading scores by an average of 24%.

Brummell’s reward: a $20,000 bonus and recognition at district award ceremonies.

Brummell, a Guyana native, likes the acknowledgment and the data-driven feedback. But she frets that the district is relying too heavily on standardized tests and isn’t doing enough to help teachers who are struggling.

As for the bonus, she almost didn’t accept it. One condition was that she give up various rights if laid off in a budget crunch.

“I love it, but it has its flaws,” she said of the district’s evaluation system, as she recovered from a busy day of explaining improper fractions.

Her complex feelings reflect the nationwide ambivalence toward the growing movement to hold teachers more accountable for what their students actually learn. Until now, evaluations typically have involved a school administrator making a quick, pre-announced visit to a teacher’s classroom. But in major districts including Washington’s, New York’s and Houston’s — and perhaps soon, Los Angeles’ — officials are using a method called “value-added” to bring a measure of objectivity to the process.

Value-added assesses a teacher’s effectiveness at raising students’ performance on standardized tests compared with how they did in previous years. Virtually no one endorses the method as the sole measure of an instructor.

For states to qualify for certain federal grants, the Obama administration is requiring that they link teacher evaluations to student performance. At least 27 states have passed or are considering legislation to meet that requirement.

“There is an absolute laser focus on teacher evaluation in this country now — I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Rob Weil of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 2,200 school districts.

But the trend has stirred opposition. Some educational experts and union leaders say that value-added is not reliable enough for high-stakes decisions on firing, tenure or pay; that it is a narrow gauge of teaching; and that it pressures instructors to “teach to the test.”

Supporters say it is one important tool to be used in combination with others, perhaps including end-of-course tests or reviews of student work. How much weight to give it, what stakes to attach, how many years of data to consider and even how to calculate the scores are not settled questions, leaving much room for discussion and debate.

At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is studying many of these questions, senior program officer Steve Cantrell said concerns that the method may inaccurately assess some teachers must be balanced against the likelihood that it will improve the chances for children to have an effective instructor. “If you shift the perspective from what is best for adults to what is best for students, then it’s super clear that value-added can improve the system over time,” he said.

In Los Angeles, the teachers union has adamantly opposed using value-added in teacher evaluations — but a school district panel named by the superintendent has recommended that it go forward. The debate erupted in August, when The Times published a database of the value-added scores of about 6,000 elementary school teachers based on seven years of testing data, prompting union protests and vows by the district to raise the issue during contract negotiations. It was the first time in the nation such information had been made public.

In New York, the city school district’s recent announcement that it would release value-added scores to the media drew an immediate court challenge from the teachers union. Underscoring warring perspectives within the district, a Brooklyn public school on Friday sent a notice to parents urging them to protest the release, saying: “OUR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS ARE NOT TEST SCORES!!”

Perhaps nowhere has the approach drawn more attention — and outrage — than in Washington, which has probably taken value-added further than any other district in the country.

Former Chancellor Michelle Rhee said she came to the nation’s capital three years ago knowing her changes would wreak political havoc. But she said she was willing to take on a system that was giving passing evaluations to 95% of teachers even as only 8% of students were performing at grade level in mathematics.

“How can you have a system where you’re that misaligned?” Rhee asked in a recent interview. “For me, it’s always about putting this in the lens of children and families … as opposed to making this a fight between groups of adults.”

She rolled out value-added analysis last year for a group of teachers in fourth through eighth grades. This year, administrators fired 75 of those teachers with poor appraisals and gave more than 700 others rated minimally effective one year to improve. The district also rewarded more than 630 “highly effective” educators with bonuses ranging from $3,000 to $25,000.

For L.A., possible lessons in D.C.’s controversial teacher evaluation system

Google Inc.’s decision to give all of its 23,300 employees a 10% pay raise next year — and a $1,000 bonus to boot — is just the latest volley in what has become a full-fledged war for top Silicon Valley talent.

With engineers in short supply, technology companies are competing for employees who can write the software programs needed for new products and services. And they’re increasingly stealing them from one another.

Google is particularly vulnerable. The Internet search giant, long known for aggressively recruiting the smartest in the business, is under siege from Facebook Inc. and other competitors that are trying to lure them away.

A few weeks ago, Lars Rasmussen, the brainy co-founder of Google Maps and a six-year Google veteran, bolted for Facebook, joining more than 200 former Google employees who now work at the world’s most popular social networking service.

Facebook tapped its most persuasive pitchman to close the deal. Founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg personally wooed Rasmussen to move halfway around the world from his Google office in Sydney, Australia, to Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto.

Facebook could be “a once-in-a-decade type of company,” the Danish-born computer science engineer said in explaining his decision.

That kind of talk rankles Google executives, who think they run the hottest company in Silicon Valley.

With 2,000 employees, Facebook is a much smaller operation than Google. Even so, 1 in 5 employees can list “Google” somewhere on their resumes, including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Executive Chef Josef Desimone, who prepares fresh meals for Facebook employees.

Facebook says its recruiters don’t target Google; they seek out top candidates wherever they work.

“For us, it’s just important to find the best talent,” said Thomas Arnold, Facebook’s director of recruiting, who himself hails from Google. “If it comes from Google, that’s great. If it comes from Hewlett Packard, that’s great. If it comes from a start-up you have never heard of, that’s great. If it’s a kid sitting in a basement in small town somewhere who has created something neat on the Web, that’s even better.”

The flight to Facebook is not a subject Google would discuss, though it did throw out a few counterpunches: Google’s attrition, it said, remains below the industry standard. It hires more people every 10 days than Facebook has recruited in all from Google. And when Google makes a counteroffer to its employees, 70% decide to stay at Google rather than leave for Facebook, the company said.

“Google is an attraction and training ground for incredible talent,” recruiter Paul Daversa said. “The question is: Can Google fill up on talent as fast as it’s losing it?”

The skirmish for talent is driving up compensation and prompting a flood of offers and counteroffers. In one case, Google countered an offer from Facebook to a software developer with a promise of a 15% bump to his $150,000 salary, a quadrupling of stock benefits and a $500,000 cash bonus to stay a year, according to people familiar with the situation. He still took off for Facebook.

Google is hardly alone as it tries to make itself as sticky as flypaper to prospective recruits and employees alike.

Despite California’s unemployment rate of 12.4%, tech job listings are up 62% year over year in Silicon Valley, which has shown 11 straight months of growth, according to technology and engineering career website Dice.com. On any given day, companies are trying to fill 4,600 jobs on Dice.com, up from 2,800 open positions last year.

That reflects the strength of Silicon Valley’s major tech companies, chiefly Google, Apple Inc. and Facebook. Google dominates Internet advertising, Apple rolls out one must-have gadget after another, and Facebook has taken flight with more than 500 million users.

Along with these companies, there are newcomers such as Zynga Gaming Network Inc., a San Francisco company that makes wildly popular social games on Facebook and elsewhere. Zynga added 800 of its 1,200 employees in the last year alone.

With strong demand for their products and services, Silicon Valley companies have plenty of money to shower on signing bonuses and retention incentives.

“We believe this trend will only accelerate in the next 18 months,” Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer, said on a call to discuss the company’s strong third-quarter results. “We strongly believe that the difference between the winners and the losers in our industry will be to a large extent determined by who can continue to attract and retain the very best people.”

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose firm helps the companies it invests in recruit engineers and other key employees, says the supercharged recruiting market is the “single hardest challenge in Silicon Valley.”

“A good engineer can easily have 10 job offers,” Andreessen said.

All the top companies are poaching from the same pool: sought-after workers with a prized mix of engineering chops, ingenuity and initiative.

They raid one another’s ranks, mine colleges and universities for promising prospects and jump at unusual opportunities to nab engineers. As soon as news broke this week that Ask.com was laying off 130 people, job offers started popping up on Twitter.

In September, Feross Aboukhadijeh, a computer science major at Stanford University, bet his roommate that in one hour he could create software that would search YouTube in real time. He lost the bet (it took him three hours) but YouTube Instant racked up 1 million users in 10 days, netting Aboukhadijeh a job offer from YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Aboukhadijeh, already an intern at Facebook, decided to take the job at YouTube while he continues his studies at Stanford.

As the behemoths duke it out, some fleet-footed start-ups are giving everyone a run for their money in the recruiting department.

Facebook is competing with companies started by its own employees such as Asana, Path and Quora. These spinoffs are snapping up their share of the brightest engineers by appealing to their entrepreneurial instincts.

“There is definitely stepped-up and accelerated pace and urgency around courting the name talent and the high-quality talent,” Daversa said. “He who courts best is going to win. You have to embrace a candidate with a big bear hug. If you blink, he’s gone.”

jessica.guynn@latimes.com
War heats up for top Silicon Valley talent

The political center, where swing voters reside and compromise happens, is suddenly a much smaller part of the Washington landscape.

There were the usual kind words and olive branches extended on Wednesday. But nothing could hide the fact that the two parties have deep and abiding differences on nearly every issue facing Congress. The composition of the House and Senate may have changed, but not Washington: The place may be more polarized than ever.

That could make it exceedingly difficult to accomplish anything of great magnitude between now and the next presidential election in November 2012.

The clearest indication of the growing partisan gap was Tuesday’s rout of the Blue Dog caucus, a group of moderate and conservative Democrats who urged the party to adopt a more business-friendly and fiscally conservative agenda. Fewer than half of its 54 members will be returning next year after incumbents were ousted in Pennsylvania, Ohio and a few Democratic pockets of the Deep South. Their absence will likely push the 190 or so remaining House Democrats even further left.

On the Republican side, the victory of dozens of insurgents backed by the “tea party” movement means the emboldened GOP majority will be even more conservative and confrontational than the one that harried President Obama over the last two years.

These lawmakers, and the legion of activists who plan to monitor their performance, have called for drastic changes, including eliminating the Department of Education, privatizing parts of Social Security and repealing the healthcare law just now starting to take effect.

After the presidency, the most difficult job in Washington may soon fall to Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader who will likely be the next House speaker. He must balance an agenda that satisfies his fervent tea party caucus without scaring off the voters — politically independent, largely nonideological — who delivered the GOP its big win Tuesday.

It was something Newt Gingrich, the House speaker after the last big GOP landslide in 1994, failed to manage when he led a similar class of zealously partisan freshmen. President Clinton, who had to argue after the so-called Republican Revolution that he was still relevant, romped to reelection just two years later.

Extensive polling, including thousands of voter interviews conducted Tuesday, shows that neither party is well regarded. The election was the third in a row in which 20 or more House seats changed hands, a level of upheaval unseen in more than half a century; these days, voters seem willing to discard unwanted politicians like so much used tissue.

But that hasn’t stopped both sides from claiming to speak for a majority of Americans. A mandate is in the eye of the beholder, and Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, an online conservative network, seemed to speak for many when she suggested compromise was a good thing — so long as others were doing the compromising.

“We hope that rather than having the gridlock, that the House and Senate will work together to find a way to be responsible with our money again and the other side will move to the center,” Martin said. “Because our side is the center.”

Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who may soon be dueling each day on Capitol Hill, said much the same thing. Both nodded toward the notion of compromise, with qualification.

“We hope President Obama will now respect the will of the people, change course and commit to making the changes they are demanding,” Boehner said. “To the extent he is willing to do this, we are ready to work with him.”

Reid, fresh off reelection in Nevada, said “the time for politics is now over.” He then suggested Republicans “must take their responsibility to present bipartisan solutions more seriously. Simply saying ‘no’ will do nothing to create more jobs, support our middle class and strengthen our economy.”

None of which bodes well for a new era of comity and bipartisan cooperation.

“If you’re a betting person, I would bet on less rather than more being accomplished in Washington,” said Geoff Garin, a longtime Democratic strategist.

If politicians look to the people for guidance, as they presumably should, they are likely to come away confused.

Voters say they hate gridlock, but many also seemed to hate the prolific legislative output of the Obama administration and the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Asked what lawmakers should make their top priority in the next Congress, nearly 4 in 10 said reducing the federal deficit. A like number said spending money to create jobs, a move that would increase the deficit. (Two in 10 said cutting taxes, which would also increase the debt.)

On a more fundamental level, voters sent similarly contradictory signals. Nearly 8 in 10 said in a Pew Research poll that lawmakers’ unwillingness to work together was a major problem. But in a subsequent survey, nearly half said they admired a politician who sticks to principle rather than compromising.

Clearly, voters are conflicted. More than ever, they have a government in Washington to match their mood.

mark.barabak@latimes.com

kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com
Midterm election’s big loser is the political center

Seated in a tan leather couch, Petty Officer Sarax suddenly straightens his back and begins flailing his right arm.

“She doesn’t know what I’ve been through,” Sarax, who just returned from Iraq, says when asked about his marriage. “There are things that I just don’t want to talk about with her. And she keeps pushing.”

He talks and behaves like a soldier overcome by combat trauma, but Sarax isn’t real. He is a software program, a life-size projection on a movie screen that is reacting and responding to questions from a psychologist being trained to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sarax is a virtual patient, one of many computer-simulated humans created by psychologists, engineers and scientists at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. By the end of the year, the virtual patient is expected to be in use in university classrooms, and eventually in clinical hospitals and military bases.

Interactive computer patients are just one of many cutting-edge virtual technologies being developed at the institute. Many of them are used as training tools for U.S. military personnel, from fighting insurgents to calming nerves of combat-weary soldiers.

The institute’s wide-ranging virtual technologies, now found on 65 military sites across the country, have popped in and out of the public spotlight, but last week they were on full display when the institute opened the doors to its new 72,000-square-foot facility in Playa Vista.

“The move is a mark of a new era for us,” said Randall W. Hill Jr., executive director of the institute, which outgrew its facility in Marina del Rey. “But really, it’s a new era for the Army as well.”

The institute’s funding has increased from $5 million in 1999 to about $30 million today — as the Pentagon has stepped up spending on training military personnel through simulations. It has also attracted a diverse staff of more than 180 professionals, from graphic designers to former Disney artists and designers.

“Five years ago, the characters were talking heads with computer-generated voices with no emotion,” said Patrick G. Kenny, who leads the virtual patient program. “Today, it’s getting harder to distinguish what is real from what is not with virtual human characters.”

Walking through the institute’s new Playa Vista offices is like walking through a fraternity house for high-tech geeks. Cubicles have white boards on which workers can quickly jot down ideas whenever they have an “aha” moment. And a corner office is more likely to be occupied by a twentysomething in a T-shirt huddled over computer monitor than a supervisor in a suit.

On a recent visit, the institute engineers were testing one of their latest first-person, multi-player games that allows players to take part in a simulated attack that includes dealing with an improvised explosive device.

The game is designed to prepare soldiers for an insurgent ambush. It is already found on three military bases, including Camp Pendleton, in northern San Diego County.

In the training simulation, soldiers sit in mock Humvees and slowly roll through towns in either Iraq and Afghanistan, which are aesthetically true to life because the institute used satellite photographs to design the town’s landscape.

“We try to make it as real as possible,” said Todd Richmond, the game’s project director.

Richmond said he knew the institute got the game right after a Marine, who had been deployed overseas, was playing the game and pointed to a shop by the side of the road and said, “Hey, I went in that place and bought a Coke.”

In addition to mapping and satellite reconnaissance, the institute uses Hollywood movie writers to come in and make the story lines more compelling. The institute is one of the country’s only organizations that draws on the entertainment industry to do such work.

Maintaining this kind of realism is key to the institute’s success, said Peter W. Singer, author of “Wired for War,” a book that examines robotic warfare. “The stuff that ICT does is really in a class of its own.”

Singer estimates the U.S. military is spending about $6 billion each year on virtual training and expects that number to rise.

“This is a medium the iPhone generation knows,” Singer said. “You can’t simply teach them on a chalkboard anymore.”

william.hennigan@latimes.com
Computer simulation is a growing reality for instruction

GOP gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman paints rival Jerry Brown as a machine Democrat who as governor decades ago spent big and coddled liberal interests while pursuing an expansive role for government. Brown says he was a deficit hawk who deftly managed the state’s finances and a world-class educational system.

Neither of the conflicting portrayals, featured in the battle the two have been waging on California’s airwaves, is exactly how those eight years went.

Brown disdained political convention and protocol and refused to govern as a run-of-the-mill liberal. He tangled with the Legislature constantly, though it was controlled by fellow Democrats: Lawmakers overrode his vetoes 12 times. And although his early approval rating hit 85% — higher than Ronald Reagan’s had reached — Brown ultimately tripped over his famous frugality, irritating voters by squeezing local schools, delaying road construction and neglecting the growing state university system.

“He had his own ideology, and it was one we had never seen before,” said Paul Priolo, who was the Assembly Republican leader during part of Brown’s governorship. “He was different.”

Brown had many successes, and several of his ideas — carpool lanes, satellite communications for California, computers in classrooms —- are commonplace now. He was the skilled dealmaker who, at 37, negotiated the landmark farm labor agreement that ended the nationwide produce boycotts. He protected some of the state’s most pristine lands and crafted energy policies that sowed the seeds of a green economy long before it was stylish.

But he was also the distracted intellectual who dawdled as soaring property taxes began to crush homeowners, spurring a ballot box revolt. He was paralyzed by the Medfly crisis and criticized for being inattentive to schools.

He recruited a dynamic group of Californians to run the government, spurning the usual insiders and filling many prominent positions with women and minorities for the first time. Some of them helped usher in such pioneering policies as a 25% reduction in air pollution and pressured Detroit for more environmentally friendly cars.

Others flailed. Rose Bird, the ardent death penalty opponent with no judicial experience whom Brown appointed as chief justice of the Supreme Court, was ultimately rejected by a 2-1 margin in a regularly scheduled retention vote.

Lawmakers were inclined to dislike Brown from the start. He came into office on the heels of a successful initiative campaign to ban lavish gifts from lobbyists to politicians. Lawmakers had earlier rejected Brown’s “two hamburgers and a Coke” proposal, inspired by his view that that’s about all a lobbyist should be allowed to buy a lawmaker.

The state Senate leader once ordered the sergeant-at-arms to halt an impromptu Brown press conference in Senate chambers and threatened to have state police forcibly evict him. By Brown’s second term, his bill vetoes were overridden so often that it appeared lawmakers were doing it for sport. No governor since has been overridden.

Sometimes it seemed like Brown was winging it — as he appears to be these days on the stump. His distaste for plans and pamphlets, policy agendas and schedules dates back decades.

“Often we have to just let things emerge,” Brown said in an interview with Playboy in 1976. “If you’re interested in agendas, you might read the inaugural speeches of the last five governors. They say much the same thing: Down with crime, unemployment and taxes.”

Brown had kept his inaugural speech to seven minutes. He talked about unemployment. Then he took a group to Man Fook Lo, a Chinese restaurant in the produce district of Los Angeles. No inaugural ball.

But liberals attracted by Brown’s progressive outlook and family legacy of big projects — his governor father, Pat Brown, built universities and freeways — were disappointed. Brown’s frugality went beyond his rented apartment with a mattress on the floor; he declared an “era of limits” and tightened the state belt even as a record state surplus mounted.

Former Gov. Gray Davis, Brown’s first chief of staff, said Brown suggested senior government staffers save taxpayers money by staying with friends when traveling instead of in hotels.

“His Department of Finance would hide money from us,” said Richard Robinson, a Democrat who represented the Santa Ana area in the Assembly. “It was a major source of frustration.”

Some programs suffered. California slipped from 18th to 31st in the nation, by some measures, in per-pupil school spending. Brown suggested that cutting off some funds for schools would inspire reform. Instead, the school day was shortened, classrooms grew crowded and teachers’ salaries fell behind those in other states.

At the state’s universities, faculty salaries were frozen. Brown said highly compensated state employees such as university professors were deriving “psychic income” from the interesting nature of their work. He vetoed raises for other state employees and curbed spending on transportation, leaving much of the freeway system, a Pat Brown legacy, to deteriorate.

The junior Brown did sign off on construction of the 105 Freeway. But mostly he focused on alternative transportation. He appointed Adriana Gianturco, a 36-year-old Bostonian with no background in highway engineering, to run Caltrans. She had opposed the 105 Freeway, rejected plans for another expressway and transformed the fast lanes on the Santa Monica Freeway into “diamond lanes” for carpoolers.

As young governor, Brown went his own way

Weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, oil company BP and subcontractor Halliburton were aware of test results showing that the cement mixture designed to seal the well was unstable — but they used it anyway, President Obama’s special commission investigating the environmental disaster reported Thursday.

The findings shed new light on troubles with the cement job on BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, which exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and causing the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The cement is supposed to secure the well pipes and keeps oil and gas from flowing up the well.

Legal experts said the information could bolster plaintiffs’ cases in the multitude of spill-related lawsuits by helping to show that BP acted with gross negligence leading up to the spill. This could, among other issues, greatly increase the multibillion-dollar penalties BP might have to pay for violation of the Clean Water Act.

“There’s no question that it’s important evidence,” said Charlie Tebbutt, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, which has filed a lawsuit seeking $19 billion under the Clean Water Act. “It serves to confirm the previous reports of significant problems with the exploration and production of the well.”

The information was included in a letter to Obama’s commission by Fred. H. Bartlit Jr., its chief counsel.

David Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan who formerly headed the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section, said the findings make it appear more likely that Justice officials will file criminal charges not only against BP and Transocean Ltd., the rig’s owner, but also against Halliburton, the Texas oilfield services giant once headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney.

“There have been questions all along about the integrity of the cement job, and today those questions loom larger and are closer to being answered,” Uhlmann said. “And those answers are not good ones for Halliburton.”

In the letter, Bartlit said that his team recently asked Halliburton to turn over samples of the cement materials like those used at the well. The materials were tested by Chevron employees at a Houston lab. The employees were “unable to generate stable foam cement” from the materials, meaning the cement would not be strong enough to keep the well sealed.

Bartlit then asked Halliburton to turn over all of the tests it had run on the mixture.

Those documents showed that Halliburton had conducted four “stability tests” of the mixture. The first two were run in February 2010 using a slightly different recipe than the one eventually used at the well. Both of these tests indicated that the mix was unstable.

Halliburton sent results from only one of those tests to BP in an e-mail March 8.

“There is no indication that Halliburton highlighted to BP the significance of the foam stability data, or that BP personnel raised any questions about it,” Bartlit wrote.

Two more tests were conducted by Halliburton in April. The first test, conducted about seven days before the blowout, again showed the mix to be unstable, although Bartlit said it may have been improperly conducted. These results were reported internally at Halliburton, Bartlit said, “though it appears that Halliburton never provided the data to BP.”

Bartlit said Halliburton apparently began a fourth test, and after modifying the testing procedure, found the cement to be stable.

“We are not yet certain when Halliburton reported this data internally or whether the test was even complete prior to the time the cement job was poured at the Macondo well,” he wrote. “Halliburton reported this data to BP after the blowout.”

Bartlit said that because BP did not have the test results, “the cement job may have been pumped without any lab results indicating that the foam cement slurry would be stable.”

BP officials did not return a call for comment Thursday. A Halliburton spokeswoman said company officials were reviewing the report.

Late Thursday, Halliburton issued a statement. Its February tests were of a different slurry mixture, the company said, and its first April test was “irrelevant because the laboratory did not use the correct amount of cement blend. Furthermore … BP was made aware of the issues with that test.”

Halliburton said its second April test used the agreed-upon mixture and showed it was stable. But BP changed the mixture that was actually used in the well, Halliburton said, and “a foam stability test was not conducted” on the new formulation.

The cement job was not the only problem that plagued the well on the evening of April 20, and Bartlit did not say that it was the only cause of the blowout.

The blowout preventer — a massive device that was supposed to shut off the well off in case of a dangerous geyser of oil and gas — also failed. Other human errors have been alleged as well. On the day of the blowout, BP canceled a test called a “cement bond log” designed to discover cement defects, saving more than $100,000.

Jesse Gagliano, a Halliburton technical advisor, also told federal investigators that BP risked causing a “severe gas flow problem” when they decided to use fewer devices called “centralizers” rather than the 21 he recommended.

Critics of BP and its partners on the Macondo project jumped on the findings to demand greater oversight of the companies involved in the accident and of the oil industry. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, said the counsel’s findings underscored the need for BP’s new chief executive, Bob Dudley, to appear before Congress, which he has recently declined to do.

“The fact that BP and Halliburton knew this cement job could fail only solidifies their liability and responsibility for this disaster,” Markey said in a statement. “We now know what BP and Halliburton knew, and when they knew it. And now we know they did absolutely nothing about it.

The report’s release sent Halliburton shares plunging 16%, to less than $30 in New York trading, but it recovered somewhat to close at $31.68, down $2.74, or 8%. BP’s American shares, however, closed at $40.60, up 1.25%.

Richard.fausset@latimes.com

Nbanerjee@tribune.com

Fausset reported from Atlanta and Banerjee reported from Washington. Rong-Gong Lin II contributed to this report from Los Angeles.
Tests warned of cement problems before well’s blowout

CHICAGO (AP) — Strong wind and torrential rain buffeted the Midwest Tuesday as forecasters predicted the giant storm could be the most powerful to hit Illinois in over seven decades.

The massive storm muscled its way across an area that stretched from the Dakotas to the eastern Great Lakes. Severe thunderstorm warnings blanketed much of the Midwest, and tornado watches were issued from Arkansas to Ohio. Flights were canceled at O’Hare International Airport, a major hub for American and United airlines.

The National Weather Service said the storm is one of the strongest to hit the region in decades.

“We’re expecting sustained winds on the order of 35 to 40 mph with gusts up to 60 mph throughout the afternoon,” said Edward Fenelon, a weather service meteorologist in Romeoville, Ill. He said the storm’s central pressure is equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane.

“This is a very different type of event,” Fenelon said. “But that does give an indication of the magnitude of the winds. This isn’t something you see even every year.”

Weather Service Meteorologist Jim Allsopp said the storm could be among the worst to hit Illinois in more than 70 years.

Commuters in the Chicago area faced blustery, wind-driven rain as they waited for trains to take them downtown before dawn. Some huddled underneath train overpasses to stay out of the gusts, dashing to the platform at the last minute. In the city’s downtown Loop, construction workers wore heavy slickers and held onto their hard-hats, heavy metal streets signs rattled against their posts and umbrellas provided relief only for as long as they could last.

“The wind was almost blowing horizontally. The rain was slapping me in the face,” said Anthony Quit, a 24-year-old jewelry store worker in Chicago. “My umbrella shot off … It was pretty dangerous.”

He said the wind was so strong that his car “was starting to veer off the road.”

Another commuter described a frightening pre-dawn drive to the train station.

“It was raining really, really hard. Coming down the street I was kind of getting really nervous; even with the bright lights you couldn’t see in front of you,” said Delphine Thompson, 53, a telecom manager in Chicago.

The weather service said gusts that topped 50 miles per hour slammed into the Chicago suburb of Lombard early Tuesday.

High winds forced authorities to stop flights at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.

A spokeswoman for the Chicago Department of Aviation said officials issued a temporary “ground stop” at O’Hare, meaning no flights are departing. Aviation Department spokeswoman Karen Pride said more than 125 flights were canceled at O’Hare. No cancelations are being reported at Midway International Airport on Chicago’s South Side.

The storm was also picking up speed on Twitter, where people were dubbing it “Chiclone” and “Windpocalypse.”

In St. Louis, pre-dawn strong winds were blamed for a partial building collapse that sent bricks, mortar, roofing and some window air-conditioning units raining down onto a sidewalk. No one was injured, and inspectors were inspecting the 1920s-era building.

In Ballwin, a St. Louis suburb, a woman escaped with minor injuries when a tree fell onto her home as she slept, covering her and her husband with dust and insulation. The family managed to get out of the house and call emergency responders.

In Milwaukee, some restaurants moved sidewalk furniture indoors as the storm approached and homeowners scrambled to batten down anything that might be swept away by the storm.

Meanwhile, much of North Dakota was under a blizzard warning. The National Weather Service said up to 10 inches of snow could fall in some areas into early Wednesday.

The snow is expected across North Dakota and into northern South Dakota. Forecasters said wind gusts of more than 50 mph in many areas would make travel treacherous.

Fenelon of the National Weather Service said the winds will subside Tuesday evening but could pick up again on Wednesday.

Eleven states are under a high wind warning. Those states are: Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Ohio and parts of Kentucky.

With a nod to the coming weekend, Jodi WhiteJones in Chicago said she hoped the storm wouldn’t lead to a Halloween-related disaster.

“Everyone in Chicago is used to foul weather but with this type of wind I just hope nobody gets hurt by things falling from buildings, flying pumpkins, debris,” said the 41-year-old assistant college dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

___

Associated Press writer Tamara Starks in Chicago, David Aguilar in Detroit and Jim Suhr in St. Louis contributed to this story.

Massive ‘Chiclone’ storm slams into Illinois; forecaster predicts strongest storm in 70 years

Defections from Meg Whitman’s ranks on the part of women, Latinos and nonpartisan voters have fueled a surge by Jerry Brown in the race for governor, according to a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll.

The shift comes after a tumultuous month for the Republican candidate that has led some voters to question her veracity and her handling of accusations by an illegal immigrant housekeeper.

Brown, the Democratic attorney general and former governor, led Whitman 52% to 39% among likely voters, the poll found. His advantage has more than doubled since a Times/USC poll in September.

The abrupt movement in the race for governor came as Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer held onto her 8-point margin over Republican Carly Fiorina in the U.S. Senate contest. Boxer’s 50% to 42% lead was statistically unchanged from September’s 51% to 43% edge.

For both Democrats, the month between the two polls found the party’s strongest supporters rallying to the candidates’ sides: liberals, women and Latinos either solidified or expanded their backing for Brown and Boxer. Nonpartisan voters, whom Republicans had counted on to overcome the Democratic advantage in voter registration, moved away from the two Republican candidates, and moderate voters also tilted toward the Democrats.

Paula Bennett, a schoolteacher in the Sacramento-area town of Acampo, said she was drawn to Brown in part by the blizzard of cash Whitman has thrown at the race.

“I like the little guy; he didn’t have the money behind him like she did,” she said in a follow-up interview, adding that she sided with Brown for the same reason that she favors a mom-and-pop establishment over a retail behemoth.

“We don’t shop at Walmart. We shop at the local store. He just seemed like more of a down-home candidate.”

Although she is Republican, Bennett is also siding with Boxer. She said she was offended by both Whitman’s and Fiorina’s infusions of personal cash into their races.

“That message that they’re sending to people is a very bad choice,” she said. “We’re looking to people to act their values rather than throw money at causes. People are holding their money really closely and those candidates are really splurging.”

Most of the nation has seen pronounced enthusiasm by Republican voters as the midterm elections approach. In California, however, Democrats have gained strength and GOP motivation has ebbed slightly in the last month, the poll showed. The current standings represent a reassertion of a more typical profile for the state after an election year convulsed by a foundering economy, widespread discontent about the future and record-breaking spending by Whitman, who has dropped more than $141 million of her own money into her campaign.

The poll was conducted for The Los Angeles Times and the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences from Oct. 13 to 20 by the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm American Viewpoint. It included a random sample of 1,501 California voters, including 922 likely voters. Results for likely voters have a margin of sampling error of 3.2 points in either direction, with a larger margin for subgroups.

The survey was taken as the two gubernatorial candidates pummeled each other over the state’s airwaves and flooded telephone lines and mailboxes with entreaties for the election — now nine days away. And it came at the close of a particularly difficult period in the race for Whitman.

A turning point appears to have been the Sept. 29 announcement by her former housekeeper, Nicandra Diaz Santillan, that she had been employed by the former EBay chief for nine years, a period during which she said Whitman became aware of her illegal status. Whitman countered that she had not known of Diaz Santillan’s status until shortly before firing her in 2009, and she released copies of falsified documents presented to her by Diaz Santillan.

Diaz Santillan, accompanied by attorney Gloria Allred in a series of sob-wracked news conferences, displayed a copy of a 2003 government document sent to Whitman and her husband that could have alerted them that their employee was using a false Social Security number.

The subsequent days of controversy upended Whitman’s carefully nuanced position on illegal immigration and whipsawed her between voters who thought she was too easy on Diaz Santillan and those who thought the housekeeper deserved better than banishment. Whitman slipped among both groups in the new poll.

Among likely Latino voters, support for Brown grew from a 20-point lead in September to a 34-point advantage in the new survey. His lead among women voters expanded from 9 points to 21 points. Among nonpartisan voters, who in California register as “decline to state” and tend to recoil from tough stances against illegal immigrants, Brown’s lead over Whitman grew from 6 points to 37 points.

At the other end of the ideological scale, Whitman’s standing among conservatives ebbed slightly, from 77% to 70%. She continued to outdistance Brown among those voters, although his support grew slightly from 16% to 21%.

Overall, by 52% to 41%, voters said that Whitman had not handled the housekeeper controversy well. The same key voter groups — women, independents and Latinos — offered the harshest verdicts. When asked how Brown had handled the matter, voters were more divided, with 37% saying he did well and 43% saying he did not. Among independent voters, a plurality approved of Brown’s actions.

Jerry Brown’s lead doubles in a month; little change in Senate race