In an email to potential donors (below) first discussed by The Frisky's Jessica Wakeman, Fiorina's campaign manager touts a video (above) of her opponent Sen. Barbara Boxer talking to a general during congressional testimony. The brief conversation seems to have offended no one who was actually involved in it, but Fiorina's campaign calls the video "shocking" and said Boxer "disrespectfully demanded" to be called "senator." Her exact words:

Do me a favor, could you say 'senator' instead of 'm'aam?' It's just a thing. (Laughter.) I worked so hard to get that title. Thank you.

This "shocking" moment of terrible rudeness is obviously the most important issue in California right now. It's a good thing voters have a tough businesswoman like Fiorina to help them identify women who espouse feminist ideals only when it advances their own ego and political interests.

Twitter has been unavailable for at least an hour; the microblogging service's status blog helpfully reports that the company has no idea what's going on.

Facebook, meanwhile has been spitting out error messages and intermittently cutting off people's inboxes, our staff has noticed.

PC World, which has also noticed Facebook problems, thinks this morning's internet mess might have something to do with Gawker Media's servers being attacked earlier this week. It wouldn't be the first time we've been accused of functioning as a gateway drug to depravity and unproductiveness.

UPDATE: Twitter reports it's fighting a denial of service attack.

So just go ahead and post your tweets and status updates in the thread below. Why not? You'll feel better, and with the messages about your breakfast or need for coffee or whatever out of the way, you might actually be productive, at your actual job.

UPDATE 2: Twitter is back. Commence insipid microblogging!

Powell's movie is part blogger story and part Julia Child biopic; Meryl Streep plays Child, the famous home-cooking guru.

Now in preview screenings, Julie and Julia is already being savaged in food blogger circles. Chef, cookbook author and food blogger Virginia Willis' slam set the tone. While professing "no malice," it took Powell to task for daring to question Child's recipe, once:

One day she made a comment implying a recipe being wrong for roast chicken. I honestly don't remember what it was, but it struck me as being so disrespectful, completely without deference to Julia Child, that I stopped. What the hell did she know about food? Had she even heard of poulet au Bresse? Didn't go back.

Actually, the term Willis was looking for was poulet de Bresse, but we shouldn't interrupt a master bravely defending Child against a disrespectful (gasp!) acolyte:

People who happen to eat and are able to type are now our new food experts... Good grief, people who don't know how to begin to roast a ding dang chicken without following a recipe can be our new, ahem, food experts.

The bitter anger of a lone chef-writer? Hardly; other food bloggers quickly agreed. "Thank you, Virginia for... bravely expressing your frustrations," wrote one. Another: "Great post." Another: "A very well written article about something which, despite being an amateur food blogger myself, does frustrate me to no end." One blogger, after watching only a trailer, said Child "deserves more than being the other half to a Nora Ephron-penned romcom about a 'lowly cubicle worker' who blogs and struggles and cries and gets a book deal." Oh, plus also, Child thought Powell was a mere stunt artist! A clown, really! What a gleeful thing, to be able to report.

Powell, you see, has made enemies of her obsessive online peers. What infuriated them most was a 2005 New York Times op-ed decrying the "insidious... snobbery of the organic movement" — an all-out assault on the Church of Alice Waters. The reaction was furious: "today's stupidest piece of information;" "gratuitous... a coarse reductionist version of the... organic movement;" "[a] shockingly incoherent thing;" "ill-informed... erroneous." Or this, after Powell panned raw foodism in the Times: "Julie Powell... needs to stop huffing dust from the crypt of Erma Bombeck."

The prevailing "Slow Food" ideology of the culinary world is that the process of nourishment should be devolved — from massive centralized farms and feedlots and factories to local growers and aritsans and ultimately home gardens; from nutritionists and other food scientists to cultural and family traditions. And ultimately, we're supposed to replace slapdash restaurants with careful preparation in small, individual kitchens.

The irony is that here we have in Julie Powell the ultimate manifestation of these principles, an amateur who dived fearlessly into home preparations, devolving not only food but, via her blog, media as well, taking both cooking and communication into her own hands. And yet the foodie priesthood seems on the verge of ex-communicating her over these very traits. Sorry, guys, but Julie Powell is literally the embodiment of an organic movement. Buy some Milk Duds (TM), splash some fake butter on your Popcorn, pop open a Diet Coke (TM) and enjoy the film.

Harvard Business Review has found, "The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production." And a separate study shows that Twitter's about the only social network where men are more likely to be "followed" by both other men and by women. That's in contrast to other social networks, where "most of the activity is focused around women."

Even Wikipedia, notorious for being run by a tiny, self-obsessed cabal, is not so bad: There, 90 percent of the content comes from the most active 15 percent of users.

Such asymmetry, of course, is baked right into Twitter's architecture. The microblogging service grew quickly because it allows one-way "follows." On Facebook, in contrast, accounts can only be linked with the permission of both parties.

If it's any consolation, relentless self-promotion is a necessary but not sufficient condition of popularity on Twitter. Have a look at Twitter's most prolific authors — have you heard of a single one? But good luck becoming one of the most influential tweeters if you don't constantly churn out copy.

[via Business Insider]

Sharon Adams uploaded a picture of her post-mastectomy chest to the social network as part of an effort to encourage women to get regular breast exams. Facebook removed it within a day as "sexual and abusive."

After 900 people joined a Facebook protest group, the company backed down and reinstated the picture (the graphic image is attached to this Daily Mail story).

The site even went so far as to say it was sorry:

Our user operations team reviews thousands of reported photos a day and may occasionally remove something-that doesn't actually violate our policies. This is what happened here. We apologise.

Better than an apology would be for Facebook to finally fix its long-abused content-flagging system, perhaps by hiring enough staff to keep up with the growth in its user base. Or maybe the company just needs a seminar to get its moderators more comfortable with the sight of the female chest.

After the state's attorney general publicly threatened Craigslist over its "adult services" ads, even in the face of recent restrictions on such listings, Buckmaster promptly blasted back with a well-written weblog post suggesting the state should also consider arresting the CEOs of AT&T, Microsoft, and Village Voice Media,

not to mention major newspapers and other upstanding South Carolina businesses feature more "adult services" ads than does craigslist, some of a very graphic nature. For a small sampling, look (careful NSFW) here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here... What's a crime for craigslist is clearly a crime for any company.

Then came the coup de grace: A lawsuit against the AG for restraining Craigslist's free speech — announced in a Craigslist blog post, naturally.

Rather than allow its reputation as a shady haven to fester, Craigslist is finally tackling it head-on. And not by hiding behind some spokesperson (as much as we adore Craigslist's Susan Best), but direct, straight from the CEO's mouth online, and via its lawyers in court.

The pushback came none too soon: New York's attorney general just busted a Queens-based prostitution ring that advertised exclusively on Craigslist.

Craigslist has long taken pride in the fact that its executives get their hands dirty; founder Craig Newmark famously calls himself "chief customer service representative." That's proven to be a lucrative strategy. Who's to say the company's muscular PR moves aren't an example worth following, as well?

UPDATE: South Carolina's AG has released a statement bizarrely taking credit for changes Craigslist made a week ago:

Columbia, S.C. – "The defensive legal action craigslist has taken against the solicitors and my office is good news. It shows that craigslist is taking the matter seriously for the first time.

More importantly, overnight they have removed the erotic services section from their website, as we asked them to do. And they are now taking responsibility for the content of their future advertisements. If they keep their word, this is a victory for law enforcement and for the people of South Carolina.

We'll chalk it up as a face-saving retreat.

Lavandeira has won a case against PerezRevenge, a gossip site which styles itself as an antidote to Hilton's "meanness." U.S. District Court Judge Gary Feess has ordered the blog's owners, Margie Rogers and Elizabeth Silver-Fagan, to stop using the PerezRevenge name, turn over the site to Hilton, and desist from "using the term 'Perez' to designate any platform, medium, and/or website that contains entertainment or celebrity news or gossip."

Which is laughable, when you think about how Hilton got his start. He first blogged on a site called PageSixSixSix, until he got a nastygram from the New York Post, which objected to his free-riding on the name of its famous gossip column. Lavandeira then came up with his play on the name of the famous hotel heiress, and became Perez Hilton. He also routinely doctors celebrity photos, arguing that sprinkling cocaine dots on them is a transformative use, entitling him to publish them. A couple years ago, several photo agencies disagreed and slapped him with lawsuits. Still, it's all fun and fair. It seems like he's just upset that someone else has joined in on the game.

Natalie Cedeno, FriendFinder's former director of human resources, was fired in January without cause, she says, after a series of run-ins with management over practices she believed were improper or illegal.

Cedeno claims the atmosphere at the company changed substantially after Penthouse Media Group acquired Various Inc., the operator of Adult FriendFinder and other websites, in 2007 and changed its name to FriendFinder Networks. Various was buttoned-up, she says, despite operating websites where users planned hookups. Penthouse, by comparison, was pure frat-boy raunch — an attitude which culminated in an incident where a Penthouse Pet draped her boobs on an unwilling female employee in a staged photo meant to humiliate her.

There's more. The complete lawsuit is included below, but here are the highlights — or lowlights:

25. In or about April, 2008 plaintiff received complaints regarding racist comments concerning employees and prospective employees being made by the company's Controller, Al Mercado. Mercado made racially disparaging comments regarding Indians, Asians and people whose spoke English as their second language, which he admitted to Plaintiff. Plaintiff met with and counseled Mr. Mercado on three separate occasions, yet his discriminatory conduct continued. The complaints regarding Mr. Mercado's racially disparaging comments were received from Accounting Supervisor, Brinda Calori who had asked to be given a new assignment because she was distressed by Mercado's conduct. Plaintiff went to Carmela Monti and recommended that Mercado be discharged. Monti refused to terminate Mercado and instead ordered that Ms. Calori be terminated. Plaintiff objected to Monti's decision to terminate Ms. Calori and complained to the Vice-President of Finance who refused to become involved. Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Ms. Calori has filed a complaint with the EEOC for retaliatory discharge resulting from her complaints.

28. In May 2008 FriendFinder brought two Penthouse Pets and a male model into the Sunnyvale office to serve ice cream to the employees. The Pets were dressed in revealing attire that caused a female supervisor to complain that their presence and the fact that they were "porn stars" made her so uncomfortable that she would stay in her office away from this activity. The Pets went up to the supervisor's office and one of them placed her breasts on the employees head while two other employees' took pictures. The supervisor came to Plaintiff's office in tears. She was visibly shaken and upset and informed Plaintiff that she was afraid the photos would be put on the Internet. Plaintiff had previously telephoned Carmela Monti, informed her that the Pets were pinching the nipples of the male employees, rubbing their bare chest and inappropriately touching staff, and asked that Monti allow her to have the Pets removed from the office. Monti had refused Plaintiff's request and after the incident involving the supervisor Plaintiff called Monti again, asking that the Pets be removed because their behavior violated the company's sexual harassment policy. Monti again refused Plaintiff's request that she be authorized to direct the Pets to leave the office. COO Tony Previte appeared supported Monti's decision, stating that the employee who complained was a "trouble maker."

39. In or about August or September, 2008, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Las Vegas office, Jason Rasberry, made inappropriate sexual comments concerning a female employee (TE). The CTO said to 5-6 male coworkers in the presence of TE (the group was standing together on a smoke break) "I've had seen TE naked and her breasts are too small." The CTO admitted having made the comment. The CTO had a history of previous misconduct in the workplace for which he had received disciplinary action. Prior to this incident the CTO had asked a male applicant who was interviewing for a position in the company's Technology Department to "chose any item and he would have one of the girls on cams.com insert it into her vagina."

FriendFinder appears to be facing severe financial trouble. The company filed for a $460 million public stock offering in December, in an effort to pay off more than $400 million in debt incurred during the Penthouse acquisition. That IPO has yet to happen. But the stock market remains unfriendly to IPOs, and FriendFinder has defaulted on some of its debt, according to a new SEC financing. A tipster tells us the company recently laid off eight marketing staffers in an effort to cut costs. And top executives seem to disagree on whether the company can afford to keep publishing the print edition of Penthouse. (FriendFinder's corporate website now softpedals the company's porn business, highlighting G-rated social networks like BigChurch.com instead.)

Cedeno v. FriendFinder - Get more Legal Forms

Thiel is the former CEO of PayPal who now runs the $2 billion hedge fund Clarium Capital and a venture-capital firm called the Founders Fund. His best-returning investment to date, though, has been Facebook. His $500,000 investment is now worth north of $100 million even by the most conservative valuations of the social network.

On the side, though, his pet passion is libertarianism and the fantasy that everything would be better in the world if government just quit nagging everybody. But, now he's given up hope on achieving his vision through political means because, as he writes in Cato Unbound, a website run by the Cato Institute, all those voting females have wrecked things:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.

So there you have it: The problem with women is that they don't vote like their menfolk tell them. We would have so much more freedom, Thiel suggests, if only we'd deprived women of it.

You may wonder: Is Thiel on drugs? The answer, according to Thiel, is yes:

As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one's IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics - capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it.

"Positive law" is Libertarian-speak for laws which proscribe certain activities, such as taking drugs. Translate Thiel's language, and you'll see that he's saying anyone in his generation who wasn't taking drugs was an idiot. Which squares with rumors we'd heard about Thiel during his PayPal days, especially while he was fitfully coming out as a gay man. With a life like that, we can understand Thiel's visceral dislike of the government. But what did women ever do to him?

Guest of a Guest noticed that once you start "following" Kutcher's Twitter account — signing up to receive the 140-character messages he posts on the microblogging service — it's impossible to drop him. A test verified the failure. Click on the "Remove" button, and you get an error message:

Reloading the page, as Twitter suggests, does not solve the problem.

CNN's @cnnbrk account, meanwhile, allows followers to drop it without any issue:

It's hard to imagine this was anything but a bug. But it calls into question the legitimacy of Kutcher's victory. Which is surely the worst possible outcome for anyone who viewed the race with a wearied sigh: Now the limelight-addicted blowhard is going to race someone to 2 million followers.

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Natalie Cedeno, the company's former HR director, says that company executives retaliated against her for pointing out violations of labor laws. She was a top executive at the Internet side of the business, deeply involved in its operations for eight years, before FriendFinder fired her without cause in January, she says. She claims the company then tried to withhold the two years of pay she was owed under her contract unless she agreed to stay silent about FriendFinder's misdeeds — a move her lawyer characterizes as "extortion." Cedeno plans to file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing next month.

And a juicy complaint it will be. FriendFinder Networks used to be called Penthouse Media Group before it acquired Various Inc., the operator of Adult FriendFinder and other online personals sites, in 2007 for $500 million. While they're both porn companies, the office cultures of Florida-based Penthouse and Silicon Valley-based Various Inc. — where Cedeno worked before the merger — couldn't have been more different. That became obvious on May 2, 2008, when the ex-Penthouse executives, now in charge of the combined business, decided to ship in a passel of Penthouse Pets to the old Various offices.

When management announced that the venerable porn magazine's stable of nude models would be stopping by the office to serve ice cream, one female employee objected, as Cedeno tells the story. When they arrived, one of the scantily clad Pets made a beeline for the dissenter. "They came into her office and placed her breasts on her head in an attempt to humiliate her, and they had someone ready to take pictures," Cedeno says. The employee quit soon after the incident.

The evening before Cedeno was terminated last month, she says she brought up at a meeting of executives an employee who had charged thousands of dollars in lapdances to the company — an expense the company's pre-Penthouse management wouldn't have tolerated. "The president laughed and said the CEO had paid for lapdances for investment bankers with company money last weekend," Cedeno says.

But wait a second: Aren't we talking about a company whose main product is porn? What are a few workplace hijinks at a business which makes money off of naked ladies? Well, there's much more than Cedeno's pay at stake. FriendFinder filed to go public last year. It desperately needs the $460 million it hopes to raise in an IPO in order to pay down $420 million in debt. If the company has legal problems and labor issues beyond what it disclosed in its SEC filings, its executives could face heavy penalties, and the IPO would likely be scotched.

FriendFinder Networks CEO Marc Bell did not return a message left requesting comment on Cedeno's allegations. The SEC restricts what companies in registration for an IPO can say publicly about their business outside of regulatory filings, a requirement known as the "quiet period."

According to Cedeno, Various operated Adult FriendFinder and other X-rated adult sites for seven years without drawing a single sexual-harassment lawsuit from employees. The company was as buttoned-down as nearby NASA contractors. Office rules restricted employees from posting any photos on office walls, or even having naughty screensavers. Cedeno says the company's longtime postman had to ask her, after six years of delivering mail, what the company actually did. And founder Andrew Conru, who took no venture capital and therefore owned almost all of the company, is famously mild-mannered. (The raciest he gets: He once told a magazine he'd had a ménage-à-trois.)

Valleywag had previously heard rumblings of discontent at the company. Over the summer, Anthony Previte, a Penthouse executive who was COO of the company, reportedly prompted a mutiny among the Sunnyvale employees by trying (and failing) to replace most of the operations team. We also heard of a messy firing in the sales department. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, according to Cedeno.

Everything changed after Penthouse bought the company and changed its name to FriendFinder Networks, she says. Within four weeks, FriendFinder had its first labor complaint, and soon drew two more. The company's former controller plans to file an age-discrimination lawsuit, Cedeno says.

Cedeno says new management was unresponsive to her concerns. When she pointed out violations of overtime law, the company's VP of operations emailed her, "This garbage stops now." (He meant her complaints, not the violations.) She says she was then ordered to lie and blame pay discrepancies on the company's outside payroll vendor. She refused.

She also says that in January 2008, Rob Brackett, president of the company's Internet group, told her that CEO Marc Bell had complained to him in December — the first day he came to visit Penthouse's new acquisition — that the women in FriendFinder's technology department were "ugly" and that Cedeno should get rid of them and replace them with more attractive workers to keep the male employees happy. Brackett pressed Cedeno, asking her how she was going to satisfy Bell. She refused the request.

The company has admitted in its S-1 filings that it failed to collect taxes owed on Internet purchased in the European Union for years. It has already charged $64 million against the purchase price of Various. (It now reports the acquisition as costing the company $401 million, down from $500 million, thanks to this and other charges.) But it has not disclosed the full extent of its pending tax bills. Cedeno says the back taxes in Germany alone come to $40 million and the company owes $10 million in another European country.

FriendFinder seems to have made a formidable enemy. Cedeno has hired Amanda Metcalf, a former prosecutor now in private practice who's best known for her role in a lawsuit against Death Row Records. I asked Metcalf why she took on Cedeno's case. "Woman done wrong," she replied. If Cedeno proves her allegations in court, FriendFinder's executives will learn a hard lesson: It's one thing to profit from women. It's another to take advantage of them.

This occurred to us after a top lawyer at TMZ's owner sent out an all-caps email screaming about the online tabloid's exclusive rights to photos of Nadya Suleman's distended octuplet-carrying belly.

Until now, we hadn't run said pics. Uh, WTF? So we called up the nice folks at TMZ and asked them what was going on. They say a photo agency called Polaris Images had been selling the Octo-mom pictures, even though TMZ had an exclusive license.

The unconfirmed scuttlebutt is that Suleman's own publicist may have given the photo to Polaris. To what end? Generating more publicity for her widely hated client? The motive isn't clear (if that's even how it happened). Peter Bolioli, Polaris's general manager for news, did not return a phone call, but a TMZ representative said Polaris stopped selling the photo after the site's request.

What's even odder: TMZ generally doesn't charge money to license its pictures to other sites; it just asks for credit and a link, in exchange for the publicity. (We get emails from TMZ all the time promoting stories in this fashion.) So what you have here seems to be a lawyer sending out an ANGRY, ANGRY email to enforce TMZ's rights to give away photos. Don't you love the Internet?

NOTICE OF TMZ'S EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS TO NADYA SULEMAN'S PREGNANCY PHOTOS

THIS IS TO ADVISE YOU THAT TMZ IS THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OF TWO PHOTOGRAPHS OF NADYA SULEMAN (THE "PHOTOGRAPHS") ATTACHED HERETO AS EXHIBIT "A" THAT TMZ FEATURED ON ITS WEBSITE AT www.tmz.com/2009/02/12/octomom-it-was-a-very-goodyear. IT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO OUR ATTENTION THAT A THIRD PARTY HAS BEEN WRONGFULLY DISTRIBUTING THE PHOTOS WITHOUT TMZ'S CONSENT.

ANY TELEVISION BROADCAST OR INTERNET USE OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS RECEIVED FROM PARTIES OTHER THAN TMZ WILL BE CONSIDERED AN INFRINGEMENT AND VIOLATION OF TMZ'S VALUABLE EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS AND WILL EXPOSE THE INFRINGER TO SUBSTANTIAL MONETARY DAMAGES.

WITHOUT TMZ'S LICENSE OR PERMISSION, YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO USE ANY PORTIONS OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS ON TELEVISION, IN ANY PRINT MEDIA, ON THE INTERNET, OR OTHER ONLINE SERVICE OR INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA TRANSMISSION, OR IN ANY OTHER MEDIUM.

________________________________

David J. Decker
EVP, Business & Legal Affairs
Telepictures Productions Inc.

(Exclusive photo exclusively via TMZ.com, exclusively)

Ha! Like anything's ever deleted on the Internet.

If you didn't catch the Wife Swap episode in question, which aired two weeks ago, it helps to understand that Stephens and her husband, British-born venture capitalist Stephen Fowler, went beyond the normal fish-out-of-water misunderstandings highlighted in the show. Instead, they inflicted every imaginable form of San Francisco snobbery, parading their education, environmentalism, and wealth before the dumbfounded Missouri couple, Gayla and Alan Long, with whom they traded families.

A week ago, Stephens published and deleted her first apology online. Two days later, she posted a fuller, more contrite apology, where she unabashedly condemned the relentless insults her husband laid on Gayla Long and the rest of the known universe.

Unabashedly condemning her husband? Why, that's something that Stephens said she would only do in private in her first apology She also posted on a Yahoo Groups message board, whence a tipster obtained it. (Both are posted below.)

In the first apology, Stephens relates how "sorry" her husband is-but never actually apologizes herself, for her statements or her husband's. She promises "behind the scenes information" and blames the episode's reception on how it was "edited" and Fowler's misbehavior on "stress." And, intriguingly, she says that her husband only agreed to do the show to support her. Reading between the lines, that suggests Stephens was hoping to promote her weight-loss business on ABC, and was unhappy with how things turned out.

Could ABC have complained that such disclosures violated the agreement she signed when she agreed to do the show? Impossible to say, but in her second apology, she made no complaints about the show's editing and says she was "utterly appalled" by her husband's "aggressively cruel and insulting" behavior, and doesn't mention his reluctance to participate.

The first apology:

I just wanted to express my deepest heartfelt gratitude to all of you for your support after the show last night. I can hardly express how much it means to me.

I would like to offer some behind the scenes information that might help as well. We had not seen the episode before Friday and had no idea how it would be edited.

First and foremost, my husband very much regrets how he behaved during the swap. He is sorry for how he treated Gayla, he is sorry for insulting middle America, and sorry about the whole thing.

He did not want to do the show but did it only to support me, but the stress of it all got to be too much for him, and he had some extremely bad moments, and all on film. So, it's like having your worst faults, and your worst behavior at your weakest moments put together into a show and all of the redeeming bits excluded from that show. For the record, he is a dedicated, loving, caring father and husband, has a great self-depricating sense of humor. He never laughs so hard as when he is laughing at himself. None of this made it to the the show.

Also, I could say nothing on TV. The last thing on earth I would do was go on film criticizing my husband, life partner, and father of my children in front of millions of people, especially when the ONLY reason he was there was to support me. That's not who I am. If I had something to say, I would say it in private.

Regarding the proud to be an American conversation. That was highly edited. For the record, I am proud of things that I have done, not things over which I had no control. I was extremely fortunate to be born American, but I didn't chose it, it's just how it happened. I do, however, greatly respect and identify with many American values, and love the way of life. I have lived in many countries and I chose to live in the US because I think it's the best place in the world for me to live. I LOVE living here. The opportunities here are amazing. The culture respects finding and pursuing your dreams, which to me is one of the most rewarding things in life. And free speech has it's upside too, most of the time!

My husband feels the same way about wanting to live in the US. That's why he chose to become an American citizen.

Know, as I think you do, that I have deep compassion for those stuggling with their weight. I struggled, and have dedicated my life to ending that struggle. With your support I can continue to do that. I hope that it's possible.

I am not checking email at the moment, but please know how much your support means to me. It is a great treasure that I am surrounding myself with right now.

With Love and Light,

Renee

The second apology:

Dear Clients, Colleagues, Friends and the interested public.

I deeply appreciate the compassionate outpouring of support many of you have shown as I struggle through this most difficult time.

Now that I have had a few days to gather the courage, I would like to share with you where I truly stand. I too am utterly appalled by my husband's behavior during the swap. I had not seen the footage until Friday night, so didn't fully know how incredibly badly he had behaved until I saw it on national TV. I knew he was not proud of his behavior and that he had many misgivings. I did not know he had been aggressively cruel and insulting on so many levels. This has been impossible for me to comprehend.

While I completely condemn his behavior I feel confused because he has been a loving and dedicated husband and father for many years. This in no way can rationalize his inexcusable behavior. It is simply an explanation of why it has taken me this long to make a statement. I have asked Stephen to get professional help.

Finally, I know that I created offense as well. When I made the statement about the parents not having advanced degrees, I was responding to direct and probing questions from the director about what level of education I thought the Long's had. I certainly don't think people need college degrees to live intelligent and valuable lives, and was not passing any kind of judgment with my comment. My edited comment regarding being an American was actually an acknowledgement that being born here isn't enough of a reason to be proud. We each need to make meaningful contributions that we are proud of and acknowledge other's contributions as well. We create community and we try to live honorably and that is what makes us proud but it's not our birthright. I am grateful to be a part of this country.

Again, thank you for your heartfelt comments.

Blessings,

Renee

A week ago, Fowler and Stephens appeared on the ABC reality program, where two families trade wives for two weeks. Stephens went to live with Alan Long, the mayor of a rural Missouri town, who sent his wife, Gayla, to the Victorian manse of the Fowler-Stephens family in Noe Valley, a wealthy San Francisco enclave of earth-loving millionaires.

Normally, this would just be just another fish-out-of-water cultural clash of the sort Wife Swap peddles all the time, with an everyone-learns-and-everyone-hugs happy ending. The rural Midwestern family loves paintball and ATVs! The rich San Francisco clan favors piano lessons, organic breakfast cereal, and energy exchange! Hahaha look at them try to get along!

Except that Fowler, a British expatriate, didn't even try to get along. He was phenomenally cruel to Gayla, giving her the silent treatment for much of her stay. When he did talk to her, he managed to insult, among dozens of groups, fat people-the fat people who pay his wife money to make them not fat. (His wife suggested that she looked down on people who didn't have advanced degrees and was not proud — shades of Michelle Obama! — to be an American. But her behavior was so much better than her husband's that it hardly drew notice.) "Agenda, that's a big word for you," Fowler said as Gayla stumbled through a set of rules she sought to impose on his family. "The most boorish and abusive of husbands ever," concluded a blogger on Reality Roll Call.

The fallout: Internet message-board commenters went even crazier than usual, posting Fowler's home address, which in turn prompted him to threaten to sue the website where it had appeared. Someone launched stephenfowlersucks.com. On Friday, Fowler finally apologized publicly (on his wife's weight-loss blog) and resigned from the boards of two environmental nonprofits on which he served. And his wife apologized, too, stating that he needed "professional help." We want to know who's apologizing to the kids.

A sample of the abuse Fowler dished out on Gayla Long:

Matt Ivester, the founder of JuicyCampus, put out a press release blaming his site's closure, planned for Thursday, on "historically difficult economic times" which have wiped out onine advertising budgets and venture-capital funding. And yet he found enough money to pay a team at BWR Public Relations, a Los Angeles PR firm known mostly for representing celebrities, to announce JuicyCampus's economic straits. We smell some kind of desperate publicity stunt to draw out white-knight investors — but what kind of fool would put money into a startup which is burning cash so obviously, right up to the end?

From: Emily Davis
Date: Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 12:33 PM
Subject: JUICYCAMPUS COMES TO AN END
To:
Cc: Steven Wilson, Hayley Scheck, Ron Hofmann, Farial Awan

B|W|R Public Relations

5700 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 550, Los Angeles, California 90036

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 4, 2009

JUICYCAMPUS COMES TO AN END

Open Letter From JuicyCampus Founder

Juicy Campers,

What a wild ride this has been! In the past year and a half, JuicyCampus has become synonymous with college gossip, and is more popular than I could have ever expected. We've expanded to more than 500 campuses across the US, and have more than a million unique visitors coming to the site every month. It's clear that we have provided a platform that students have found interesting, entertaining, and fun.

Unfortunately, even with great traffic and strong user loyalty, a business can't survive and grow without a steady stream of revenue to support it. In these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved. JuicyCampus' exponential growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn, and as a result, we are closing down the site as of Feb. 5, 2009.

On behalf of everyone here at JuicyCampus, I would like to thank all of our users for reading, contributing to, and telling your friends about the site. And I'd like to thank everyone who has engaged in meaningful discussion about online privacy and internet censorship. JuicyCampus has raised issues that have passionate advocates on both sides, and I hope that dialogue will continue. While there are parts of JuicyCampus that none of us will miss – the mean-spirited posts and personal attacks – it has also been a place for the fun, lighthearted gossip of college life. I hope that is how it is remembered.

Keep it Juicy,

Matt Ivester

Founder & CEO, JuicyCampus.com

Los Angeles, CA

February 4, 2009

Media Contact:

Steven Wilson/Hayley Scheck
B|W|R Public Relations

Emily Davis
B|W|R Public Relations
5700 Wilshire Blvd
Suite 550
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Iglesias — whose private-performance fee is estimated at $1 million — was only the start of the bills for the wedding, held last weekend at the Marquis Cabo San Lucas hotel.

Kordestani's ex, Bita Daryabari, and her groom, vascular surgeon Reza Malek (pictured above, at a charity event in San Francisco), stayed in a $4,000/night presidential suite. Colin Cowie, the celebrity wedding planner who's seen Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Jennifer Lopez, and others to the altar, organized the nuptials. Some of the guests took chartered planes Daryabari and Malek paid for. A tequila party on the beach ended with fireworks; the last fusillade took the form of a heart. A chef was flown in from New York to cater the affair. Paparazzi, in town to lens Jennifer Aniston, stumbled across the event — which, in a way, only added to its gaudy glamour.

It is hard to imagine a worse time to throw an extravagant wedding. But Daryabari surely had other things on her mind.

What turned Daryabari, a telecom executive turned philanthropist, into a towering Bridezilla? Her husband, Kordestani, was Google's 12th employee and its first salesman. He struck a search-licensing deal with the now-forgotten Netscape, then an Internet powerhouse where he previously worked, that made Google viable. Google's IPO made Kordestani wealthy, and as Google's shares soared, his fortune grew into the billions of dollars.

But then Kordestani fell in love with a coworker, Gisel Hiscock (right, and yes, that's really her name, poor dear). A rumored reconciliation after the revelation of his affair never happened. The couple moved to London last summer. Somewhere along the line, Daryabari and Kordestani finalized their divorce.

Which, naturally, gave her a big chunk of Kordestani's Google fortune. And what better way to rub her ex-husband's face in her happiness than by spending his money, a million dollars at a time, on the most extravagant event imaginable? If it weren't a supremely arrogant Googler, the self-crowned king of the new advertising world, getting his comeuppance, we might say her wedding was in poor taste. But is there a sweeter taste than revenge?

(Photo by Drew Altizer via SFLuxe)

Lisa Stone, Elisa Page and Jory Des Jardins started BlogHer with some mumbo-jumbo about "empowerment." Smart move — empowerment sells! Somewhere along the line, they started selling ads for other blogs. MediaMemo reports that BlogHer is cutting ad payments by 10 percent. Sounds terrible, right?

But then you read the email Stone, Page, and Des Jardins sent, and you learn that BlogHer had been giving bloggers a fixed share of the ad revenues. That's a share of gross revenues, not net — no allowances made for commissions for salespeople, servers, bandwidth, and so on. What's changing: BlogHer will now take 10 percent off the top to cover costs, and pay bloggers a share based on 90 percent of the gross ad revenues. (Page tells me the share is now 50 percent, and will effectively drop to 45 percent after the change.)

Compare that to Google, which typically pays 88 to 89 percent of revenues to websites it represents — but those are net revenues, not gross revenues. (Google has a reputation for paying much less to smaller sites, and more to big partners like AOL and MySpace.)

Sounds to me like a woman-on-woman crime — but Stone, Page, and Des Jardins were the victims here. It escapes me why women like these three have such a hard time asking for the money they deserve. They managed to get venture capital from NBC and Venrock, after all. But the way they've been running their business sounds like the opposite of empowerment.

(I updated this post to clarify how BlogHer's revenue sharing works, after getting an email from Page.)

The rumor itself is actually at least 18 months old — we first heard it last year after a reporter at a major business magazine got the News Corp. nuclear treatment when he rang up the flacks to ask whether they had made out at a party — largely spurred by Deng being named the "chief of strategy" at MySpace China last summer, putting her in close (business) contact with DeWolfe. And then there were reports that DeWolfe was using his friendship with Deng in his negotiations for a new compensation package with News Corp.

The first time in the most recent spate of tips was in the form of an an email from someone using the Dark Knight pseudonym "Harvey Dent" and was pre-written in gossip-columnese ("What media mogul billionaire’s wife has been guilty of so many sexual escapades that she is the talk of LA?"), but it also made some amateurish mistakes, such as referring to "Wendy Deng." The second tipster came from inside a media organization that's locked horns with News Corp. plenty of times in the past. The third was the most aggressive. Their first account was that they had heard that someone with a grudge against Murdoch had hired a private investigator who had discovered that Deng was involved with "Chris DeWitt." Asked why someone was digging dirt on Rupert, they said it was "more of a personal interest."

None of the new tipsters have offered any new evidence to made us think it's true. Like the Jossip item, all leaned heavily on the detail that they're hooking up at 141 Prince St. But that's hardly a secret address. since that's where the Murdochs live when they're in New York. And as someone familiar with the Murdochs points out, they sold that apartment in 2005 and now live on Fifth Ave. So color us skeptical. Though, of course, if you know more than our previous tipsters, we're interested in that, too.

Oprah invited Perry on her show, as this clip shows, and thanked him. But Perry should be thanking Oprah. This is why every geek switches from blogging about APIs to blathering about politics. None of Perry's venture-capital investments would ever have gotten him on Oprah — but his volunteer work for Obama's campaign did.

Updating our previous map, it is now inevitable that Barack Obama, noted author, law professor, community organizer, state Senator, convention keynoter, and US Senator, will be the 44th President of the United States, with a minimum of 284 electoral votes.

Go wild kids!!!

CNN makes their call

So does Fox