According to the Wall Street Journal, this took place around January 2011, as Schwarzenegger was leaving office as governor. It's not clear why the plan was terminated, but that May, Schwarzenegger admitted to fathering a child with his nanny. Bullet: dodged.
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Adelson. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee bowed on Thursday to Sheldon Adelson's threat to sue for falsely accusing the very rich casino magnate — who has been throwing wads of cash at pro-Romney super-PACs and other GOP groups — of dabbling in the pimping business. It all started in late June, when the Associated Press reported that the fired former chief executive of Las Vegas Sands Corp.'s Macau casino alleged in a civil lawsuit that Adelson "personally approved of prostitution and knew of other improper activity at his company's properties in the Chinese enclave."
According to ABC, the DCCC had some fun with that, referring to Adelson's financial relationship with certain prominent Republicans with a post on its website asking, "What will Speaker Boehner, Leader Cantor and House Republicans do with their Chinese prostitution money?" Adelson's attorney demanded a retraction, and he got it. Tail tucked firmly between legs, the DCCC wrote in a statement:
Ron Reese, a spokesman for Adelson said in a statement that he was gratified that the DCCC "acknowledged the error." He continued, "More broadly, this should serve notice to those who would attempt to smear Mr. Adelson by repeating the false and inflammatory statements of a fired employee — that this is a very slippery slope."
In other words, Adelson's threats to sue are not idle and he will rain hell upon you with expensive lawyers if you attempt to besmirch him.
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Michele Bachmann's claim that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and fellow Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison may have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood has members of her own party calling her a modern-day Joseph McCarthy, but it doesn't seem to be slowing her down. She told the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Monday, "We cannot elevate political correctness over national security," and other Republicans have also come to her defense, most notably Newt Gingrich, who wrote a lengthy Politico op-ed condemning the "recent assault on the National Security Five" (that's the brawny new brand name for Bachmann and the other representatives). Though Democrats are hoping that the controversy will help sway Minnesota voters in the fall, there's little evidence that her so-called "witch hunt" will have an impact in her home district.
On a national scale, Minnesota's 6th District isn't the most conservative, but it's the most staunchly Republican district within the state. It was one of only two congressional districts in Minnesota to vote for John McCain in 2008, and as the National Journal notes, recent redistricting only made it more solidly red. Bachmann's opponent, wealthy Minneapolis hotel owner Jim Graves, has tried to capitalize on the controversy by rolling out Facebook ads demanding that she "end her McCarty-style witch-hunt" and penning a Huffington Post editorial in which suggests she's abandoned the people of Minnesota's 6th district to "chase wild conspiracy theories in a self-interested attempt for fame and publicity." He's positioned himself, on the other hand, as a moderate Democrat who could be an acceptable alternative for Independents and Republicans fed up with Bachmann's antics.
But Graves still faces an uphill battle. Recently he released an internal poll of 505 likely 6th District voters that shows Bachmann leading with 48 percent of the vote to his 43 percent, with a 4.4 percent margin of errors, which would put him within striking distance of the three-term representative. However, Bachmann has a huge fund-raising advantage over Graves. She's raised more than $14.8 million in the current election cycle, making her one of the House's top fund-raisers. While Graves is said to be worth more than $100 million, he's only raised $404,000, and $250,000 of that was his own money.
Incredibly, being condemned by fellow Republicans could actually work to Bachmann's advantage. In 2008 Bachmann's Democratic opponent got a fund-raising bump after she said in an interview with Chris Matthews that members of Congress should be investigated for their "anti-American" leanings. However, as the Minnesota Post reports, that was only weeks before the election and many locals aren't following the race that closely in the middle of the summer. Bachmann already claims in her fund-raising e-mails that "being such a vocal proponent of constitutional conservatism and an opponent of President Obama and his disastrous policies has made me a top target for defeat this year." Being called out by leading congressional Republicans supports her persecution narrative and could energize supporters outside of Minnesota. The Star Tribune reported in July that 80 percent of Bachmann's campaign contributions came from donors who don't live in the state. Bachmann's campaign announced on Tuesday that from July 1 to July 25, when the scandal was unfolding, she still managed to raise more than $1 million.
Many Washington insiders who have known Huma Abedin for years are horrified by Bachmann's accusations. However, her base doesn't have the same aversion to her calls to investigate an unknown, oddly named aide, and their contributions will fund ads that can turn Minnesotans' attention to other issues in the fall.
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On the question of whether controlling gun ownership is more important than protecting the rights of gun owners, Americans feel almost exactly the same as they did before James Holmes shot 70 people in a movie theater, according to Pew. That's a broad, almost philosophical question though. Get into the specific proposals being made — should assault rifles and 100-bullet magazines like the ones Holmes used be legal? — and we bet you'll see some movement.
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Attempting to silence one's critics online almost always results in a massive magnification of their complaints. Today's example comes via the British journalist Guy Adams, who spent hours on Friday bashing NBC's delayed stateside coverage of the Olympics as "disgusting money-grabbing" by "total buffoons." In one tweet from his rant, Adams wrote, "The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven't started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think! Email: Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com." Soon after, Adams found his account had been suspended — "for posting an individual's private information such as private email address," as Twitter later informed him. Whether the address in question was actually private is arguable, but the shaky application of the rule is only undermined by the fact that Twitter and NBC have a strategic partnership for the Games.
While Adams's account remains down, his cause has blown up.
In an e-mail to Twitter, obtained by Deadspin, Adams writes:
I'm of course happy to abide by Twitter's rules, now and forever. But I don't see how I broke them in this case: I didn't publish a private email address. Just a corporate one, which is widely available to anyone with access to Google, and is identical to one that all of the tens of thousands of NBC Universal employees share.
It's no more "private" than the address I'm emailing you from right now.
Either way, quite worrying that NBC, whose parent company are an Olympic sponsor, are apparently trying (and, in this case, succeeding) in shutting down the Twitter accounts of journliasts who are critical of their Olympic coverage.
Am I to presume, for example, that they decided to complain about me because of my recent article in the Indy's news page about their various failures?
His account of the saga can be seen here, and includes confirmation that NBC Sports filed a complaint to have his account removed for posting the "personal information of one of our executives." (Adams also appears to have retweeted a link to an illegal stream of the Opening Ceremony, but that message was not cited as a suspend-able offense by NBC or Twitter.)
According to Twitter's rules, private and confidential information includes "non-public, personal email addresses," while Zenkel's is clearly corporate, not personal. If it was ever private, it's not now.
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At least, a CNN spokesperson claims the network didn't mean to offer the intro song as commentary on Sarah Palin's intellect prior to a short segment on CNN Sunday Morning regarding Palin's support for fast food chain Chick-fil-A, which is mired in its own public relations crisis right now. The song in question — Pink's "Stupid Girls" — was the first single off her 2006 album I'm Not Dead. "The music selection was a poor choice and was not intended to be linked to any news story," a CNN spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter, adding, "We regret any perception that they were planned together." So it wasn't selected for a particular story, someone at CNN just thinks "Stupid Girls" is a great song to listen to while you're watching the news.
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Women workers head home from the Navy Yard at quitting time, September 1942. The waterfront at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on a ragged inlet opposite the bulge of the Lower East Side, is both an exhilarating place and a melancholy one. Out beyond a collapsing pier, the Williamsburg Bridge executes its grand jeté across the East River. In an immense World War II–era dry dock, granite-walled and roomy enough for the Empire State Building to stretch out, an oil barge is getting a fresh coat of red paint. A giant tanker waits outside the imperial-scale gates for its turn to be spruced up. Nearby, the high-end printing company Duggal Visual Solutions has nearly finished refurbishing a huge derelict shed, stripping it down to the bones and recladding the skeleton in clear glass and dark stone. The structure will serve as a laboratory for environmentally virtuous inventions. Eventually, the crumpled asphalt out front will get a landscape makeover too; for now it’s best navigated in a high-clearance truck.
The roughly 300-acre campus is easy enough to steer clear of, if you have no business there—the closest subway stop is a fifteen-minute walk—and most New Yorkers probably have only a hazy idea of how to find it. But it’s also astonishingly central, and its proximity to the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges, as well as the BQE, has become too providential to ignore. All across the grounds, you can see the drift of entropy being slowly, fitfully reversed. Decay coexists with vigor. After Defense secretary Robert McNamara decommissioned the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966 (along with the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Fort Jay on Governors Island, and nearly 100 other military facilities), it entered a 40-year period of ruinous neglect. The result is a scarred and fragile loveliness. Weather and vegetation have reclaimed the doomed houses along Admiral’s Row, all but two of which will eventually make way for a supermarket complex. Other vacant relics will survive, including the 1838 hilltop hospital constructed of Tuckahoe marble, the local stone that gave so many of New York’s nineteenth-century public buildings their pale, antique grandeur. Across the way is the graceful Civil War–era Surgeon’s Residence, a mansarded mansion in desperate need of attention yet sturdy enough to be rescued.
But the true beauty of this historic industrial park is that it’s still an industrial park. The paradox of preservation is that often, the more you safeguard a building’s appearance, the more its character changes beyond recognition. This is especially true of machine-age behemoths or buildings designed for a precise technological moment. We recycle silos as apartment buildings, turn power plants into parks, and install museums in empty factories. We protect the body and sacrifice the soul.
At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, though, industrial buildings are being rejuvenated so that people can do what they always did there: make things. Activity has reached a bustling crescendo. The number of workers has nearly doubled in the last decade, to about 6,000 people staffing more than 275 businesses. Disused buildings are being restored or rebuilt. Products made in Brooklyn are adorning homes, protecting soldiers, illuminating streets, and sweetening coffee. Pee into a vial at the doctor’s office, and your urine may get sent here for testing. Spend a weekend morning at MoMA, meet friends for brunch, take a nap on your custom couch, turn on the air conditioner, order a gift online, wrap up the evening peering at the sets on Saturday Night Live, and it’s possible that every comfortable and leisurely minute of your day will involve a company located at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Still, that buzz is drowned out by a choir of thronging ghosts. During World War II, 70,000 people came to work here every day, grinding out warships and materiel. The glowering lattice tower atop a muscular but now vacant brick building was a naval radio installation. A photograph in the Yard’s archives shows a clutch of grinning young Rosie the Riveters marching through the gates while their new male co-workers gawked.
Today, the vibe is cleaner, greener, and more muted. Barbed-wire fences have come down and groups of visitors file through on tours. Employees lock their bikes to stands designed and manufactured by one tenant, Ferra Designs, and find their way after dark thanks to solar-and-wind-powered streetlights made by another, LumiSolair, a Duggal sister company. Building 92, the brick-and-cast-iron Marine Commandant’s House, has been expanded to contain a sleek multimedia exhibit about the Yard. The military-industrial complex endures in the vestigial form of Crye Precision, a boutique purveyor of high-tech body armor for elite forces. Crye’s vests are hand-sewn, mostly by a couple dozen skilled Chinese tailors who commute from Sunset Park—a workforce that once could have crammed into a single Lower East Side tenement.
The Navy Yard itself is something of a premium product: Businesses that could rent cheaper real estate on Long Island or in New Jersey (or in China) pay the Brooklyn premium because owners want to work near their homes and clients and other like-minded entrepreneurs. As a result, the Yard is evolving into a center of environment-oriented innovation. Duggal hopes to operate its vast new sustainability laboratory with a carbon footprint of zero. Another giant U-shaped complex of three buildings in various states of spectacular dilapidation will soon be getting a $46 million overhaul to turn it into a Green Manufacturing Center, shared among various businesses, including Crye. What was once a vast, rattling war machine is now quietly battling a culture of waste.
The Navy Yard is slouching back to life under the management of a nonprofit development corporation and its president Andrew Kimball, who runs the operation with a mixture of vision and focused realism. Part capitalist, part preservationist, part urban-policy wonk, Kimball helps businesses make money while at the same time acting as caretaker for a site that is at least partly a museum of itself. Much of his work involves the expensive and unsexy labor of shoring up bulkheads, repairing sewers, smoothing roadways, and stabilizing brittle walls. But Kimball also believes that in the next decade he can double both the number of jobs and the active square footage, and he dreams of creating a 50-acre media-and-entertainment campus that would include the old hospital grounds.
All that could happen. Steiner Studios, the enormous soundstage and back-lot complex that anchors the Yard, has been expanding, and Kimball figures that if he can scrounge up $38 million in public funds, that should leverage another $350 million from Steiner. Meanwhile, the studio is helping Brooklyn College launch a new graduate film school—the only one in the country located on a working movie lot.
We know vanished civilizations by the biggest, brawniest, and most durable buildings they leave behind: Roman stadiums, Egyptian temples, medieval cathedrals, Renaissance châteaux. The last 200 years have bequeathed to us an ungainly legacy of industry, and what we make of that inheritance helps define who we are. At the peak of the machine age, factories were emblems of human might, and artists like Charles Sheeler hymned their majesty and ruthless purpose. Later, the decline of manufacturing in the West gave us a new Gothic landscape, and we have come to savor the poetics of abandonment: silent smokestacks, vaulted basilicas with missing windows, massive brick fortresses, looming silos, weed-mossed trolley tracks, great steel trusses furred with rust. At the same time, the word industrial has been trivialized into an aesthetic label, shorthand for restaurants done in polished concrete and brushed steel.
The Navy Yard contains the whole catalogue of lyrical decay. You could see it as a vast and dour still life, murmuring its warnings of ashes to ashes; as an evocative ruin, eloquent of less-than-ancient glories. You might also see it as an aspect of New York’s future. The most visible changes to the waterfront have been the glittery stretches, devoted to vigorous exercise and utter languor. But the city has been shoring up the working waterfront too, convinced that even a postindustrial megalopolis can still nurture shipping, manufacturing, and other olden trades. (The Brooklyn Army Terminal and Industry City, in Sunset Park, are being slowly resuscitated, too.) The Yard’s future depends on entrepreneurs who understand the value of the past—who treat history as a resource rather than an expensive inconvenience. Sure, it’s often easier to tear down a ruin and start again than to fuss over antique stones and steel—but then you might as well just pave a fresh patch of desert in Nevada and build your business there.
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Google knows who your friends are more than you because it collects all data about your friends for the optimization of Google Social Search.
Visit this Google Circle page and Google will show you all your connections split downs into various categories.
You will be amazed to know how much Google knows about your friends circle.
How Google Social Search Works:
The Google gathers all this information from your Gmail contacts, Gtalk chat list, people you are connected through social networks, people you are following on Google reader and Google buzz.
Next time if you ever lost your contacts or wondering who your friends are be sure to check out Google social circle.
