Gawker: valleywag, bill clinton

Bill Clinton Wants His Domain Names Back

Owen Thomas — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:00:00 EDT

In the late '90s, private investigator Joe Culligan registered presidentbillclinton.com and other Clintonesque domain names as a joke. Now Bill Clinton's lawyer is pursuing legal action to get the website addresses. It's payback, says Culligan.

For months, Culligan has been digging into the mystery of why Maggie Williams, a longtime Clinton staffer who served as Hillary Clinton's campaign manager and now works for her as a Secretary of State recruiter, used Clinton's taxpayer-funded office to receive correspondence about stock options she received from Delta Financial, a subprime lender.

It's the most obscure imaginable charge. What, does Culligan think Clinton ripped off taxpayers by having a government-paid clerk drop the letter off at Williams's desk? It's hardly a scandal compared to the $1 million-a-year bill the government has paid since 2001 to fund Clinton's post-presidential operation.

It would have been a simple thing for the Clinton camp to brush off the charge as irrelevant. But the move to reclaim Clinton's domain names suggests that the charge has stung nonetheless. What is it about Williams's mailing address that has Clinton's lawyers so worried now — as opposed to any point in the past decade, during which time Culligan pointed presidentbillclinton.com, williamjclinton.com, and williamclinton.com as a gag to the Republican National Committee's website?

(Photo by AP)

Bill "Bubba" Clinton breaks Google party plane

Jackson West — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:40:00 EDT

Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin graciously lent their plush Boeing 767, otherwise known as the Google party plane (photographed in Newark last week), to former president Bill Clinton for a media tour of Africa. However, on a runway in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, en route to Rwanda, the takeoff was aborted and the plane grounded, forcing Clinton to ride on Jon Bon Jovi's old 707 commandeered for the press gaggle in New Jersey. My guess? Clinton just couldn't lay off the injera and tej and the plane blew a gasket. [Industry Standard]

Bill Clinton updates Facebook profile to say "It's complicated" with Hillary

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:40:00 EDT

Minutes after New York Senator Hillary Clinton sent an email to her supporters ending her campaign, President Clinton changed his Facebook profile relationship status from "Married" to "It's Complicated." He also added that he was now looking for "friendship," "dating," and "a relationship." We're guessing Bill Clinton doesn't actually update his own Facebook page and that the changes were more likely a frustrated campaign supporter's way of venting. (Update: Or maybe a satirical blogger's.) Asked by a "reporter" about the change, campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson answered: "What can I tell you? It's complicated."

Vinod Khosla's Brazilian ethanol venture uses slave labor, just like most Valley startups we know

Jackson West — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:20:00 EDT

The Brazil Renewable Energy Company, or Brenco, was the target of the Brazilian Labor Ministry's slave-labor investigation unit last month. Brenco produces ethanol from sugarcane, which is more carbon-efficient than corn-based ethanol but incredibly labor-inefficient — cane farming is some of the hardest work on Earth. How did the company, backed in part by Vinod Khosla's VC firm, address this inefficiency? By paying workers less than a dollar an hour, packing them cheek-to-jowl in substandard living conditions, preventing them from leaving the unsanitary housing on their free time, feeding them poorly, and (rather ironically for an ethanol manufacturer) banning alcohol.

Brenco also counts former president Bill Clinton, big money Democrat Ron Burkle and AOL founder Steve Case as investors. 133 workers freed from their servitude received a final paycheck and bus tickets home. I guess Brazilian workers just don't understand the entrepreneurial spirit of putting in long hours at a startup to help the company succeed. Savvy Valley employees know that if you want to enjoy basic human freedoms you should work at Starbucks or the post office.

(Photo by AP/Andre Penner)

Harvard Business School, White House alumna says connections don't matter

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:00:33 EST

In an interview with BoomTown's Kara Swisher, Facebook's new second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg says "Silicon Valley is a very good place for women."

For a couple reasons. It's a meritocracy. People really care about ideas here. None of the old school where'd-you-come-from stuff applies in Silicon Valley and I think that helps women.

Where Sandberg comes from:

Google
The Clinton White House
Harvard College
Harvard Business School

She was also Larry Page's connection to Bono. But I'm sure that doesn't matter, either.

Clinton spokesman denies Googler wedding rumor

Owen Thomas — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 14:01:18 EST

Phil Singer, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, says neither she nor Bill will be at Larry Page and Lucy Southworth's wedding being held today on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands. That's a shame. Richard Branson's Caribbean getaway is a lot warmer than Iowa, HIllary. And there are worse places to hit people up for campaign donations. Maybe she's just trying to avoid a photo op with the Bushes?

President Bush, Clintons to meet at Googler wedding?

Megan McCarthy — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:27:06 EST

We've heard rumors that there will be three presidents attending the Caribbean wedding of Google cofounder Larry Page and his bride-to-be, Lucy Southworth. The Times Online is reporting that Bill and Hillary Clinton are expected to attend, which leaves two presidents unaccounted for. The likeliest candidates: Dubya and his dad. Here's why.

The evidence: Lucy's sister Carrie Southworth, pictured, is an actress whose latest appearance was in an episode of CBS's Rules of Engagement. She is married to Coddy Johnson, the field director of George W. Bush's 2004 presidential campaign. Johnson is the son of Clay Johnson, Dubya's roommate at Yale.

Coddy Johnson is also the godson of George W. Bush, according to a classmate at Stanford's business school, where Johnson graduated this past spring, putting him on campus at the same time as Lucy, who recently passed the oral exam for her Ph.D. in bioinformatics.

Larry and Lucy are hosting a reported 600 guests on Necker Island. Surely the couple could make room for her sister's husband's godfather — maybe even his dad. The presence of a sitting president would also explain the extraordinary security measures Page and Southworth are taking.