Thursday, October 7, 2010
Giants, Braves snatch last two playoff tickets - USA Today
What to expect from Google TV - Washington Post
Google TV - the Web giant's software package for finding and watching TV programming over the Internet and through traditional subscription services - looks less vaporous now. Just in time for introductions of Google TV-enabled hardware from Sony and Logitech, Google announced further details about the platform it launched in May.
A blog post and accompanying video advertise many of the usual online video and audio services: movies and TV shows from Netflix or Amazon's video-on-demand service, shorter clips from Google's own YouTube, Web radio from Pandora, photo browsing from Yahoo's Flickr, and so on.
But Google TV also will include a set of Web applications, some video-enhanced, from the NBA, CNBC and Twitter, among others. A "Fling" feature will let you toss the Web page or video you're viewing on a smartphone (presumbably one running Google's Android operating system) to Google TV. And early next year, Google TV will be able to run apps downloaded from Google's Android Market.
But note some video sites not listed: Hulu (coming to Roku's Web-media receivers and TiVo digital video recorders, to be followed by some HDTVs and Blu-ray players), Major League Baseball's MLB.tv (already on Roku and in Boxee's software) and ESPN3.com (unavailable on any Web-media box).
And, of course, Google TV won't be able to play movies or TV shows streamed or downloaded from Apple's iTunes Store. For those, you'll still need to hook up a computer to the TV or get just-updated Apple TV.
Future Google TV software updates could fill in some of those gaps and add other new features. One interesting possibility would be simple video calling.
For One Tea Party Candidate, Time to Temper the Message - New York Times
“I smile when I think of what we can do together in the Senate if the people send me,” Mr. Paul wrote.
Mr. DeMint related the note to the crowd of 300 people at the evening rally, in Erlanger. He said he himself smiled at the thought of “not just us two but eight or 10 senators” being elected and going up against the Republican establishment to push the Tea Party goal of limited government.
But Mr. DeMint’s smile may have vanished by morning. During a nationally televised debate on Fox News Sunday, Mr. Paul said that if he were elected to the Senate, he would support Senator Mitch McConnell, also from Kentucky, to keep his job as Republican leader.
Pressed to say whether he would choose him over Mr. DeMint, Mr. Paul said that he would vote for whomever Republicans chose as their leader and that he assumed it would be Mr. McConnell.
It was one more sign that no matter how devoted Mr. Paul is to Tea Party principles, he may be forced to yield periodically to some realities of the old-school politics that he denounces.
This also occurred last month, when Mr. McConnell set up a fund-raiser in Washington for Mr. Paul with several Republican senators who, like Mr. McConnell, had supported the $700 billion bank bailout in 2008; during the primary, Mr. Paul said he would not accept donations from anyone who had done so.
With the election just a month away, Mr. Paul’s wide lead in the polls over Jack Conway, his Democratic opponent, has narrowed, but he still appears ahead. And Mr. Paul may be acting a bit more cautiously these days to hold on to his lead, which is par for the course for many candidates after they emerge from a party primary and face the broader electorate.
“His approach has changed,” said Trey Grayson, the secretary of state, who lost in the primary to Mr. Paul. “He’s acting more like an incumbent. His tone is designed more for a general election audience and swing voters.”
But, Mr. Grayson quickly added, Mr. Paul still gets across his points. “He still, at the end of the day, talks about shrinking the size of the government,” Mr. Grayson said. “Those things haven’t changed, and that’s why he’s ahead in the polls.”
During the spring primary, Mr. Paul invariably opened his speeches by declaring that “a Tea Party tidal wave is coming.” His “randslide” win of the Republican nomination was the movement’s first major success on the national stage.
Now, his references to the Tea Party are fewer and farther between. On a trip last week through eastern Kentucky, the trademark yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags of the movement were gone. Mr. Paul did not sound his earlier battle cry that he would shut down Congress for a week if it failed to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget. In fact, he did not mention the Tea Party at all.
Almost inconspicuous in a dark blue button-down shirt and cotton pants, Mr. Rand began his short speech in London by reciting in a soft voice the names of the other small towns he had just visited.
“I haven’t met one person on the entire trip who is in favor of President Obama or any of his policies,” he said. Even Democrats, he added, “realize that this is the most anti-Kentucky, anti-coal president we’ve ever had.”
He put in a slight dig at his opponent, Mr. Conway, whom he did not name and whom he rarely mentions, saying that the Democrat had once supported the cap-and-trade legislation, which is much loathed in this coal-producing state. “He was for it before he was agin’ it,” Mr. Paul, who is an ophthalmologist, said.
At Saturday’s rally, Mr. Paul did acknowledge the Tea Party — his campaign had bused in several dozen members of a contingent from northern Kentucky, who were having a convention nearby. Mr. Paul shared the stage with his father, Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican and 2008 presidential candidate, and with Mr. DeMint, and they were more overtly whipping up Tea Party sentiment.
The Conway strategy has been to cast Mr. Paul as out of the mainstream (in one advertisement, some seniors say he is “off the wall” and question “what planet” he is from). They also portray him as being unfamiliar with the state. Indeed, Mr. Paul focuses chiefly on national issues, like the debt and spending.
But Danny Briscoe, a Democratic consultant here who is not part of the Conway campaign, said this approach had not worked so far. Mr. Paul has “managed to appear normal,” Mr. Briscoe said, particularly with other controversial Tea Party-backed candidates, like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, taking over the national stage.
Analysts here say the race appears to be Mr. Paul’s to lose. It seems he would have to make a blunder of gigantic proportions to alienate his supporters, and neither candidate appeared to make many in the debate on Sunday.
Post Tech: Android takes smart-phone lead from BlackBerry, iPhone - Washington Post
Android phones have replaced the BlackBerry and iPhone in popularity among new users, according to new data by Nielsen.
Statistics show that Google's operating system for mobile phones has become a greater threat in the dynamic and competitive market for wireless smart phones.
In August, 32 percent of new users (people who bought a phone within the past six months) purchased a device running on Google's operating system, more than double the portion of new users surveyed in January.
Research in Motion's BlackBerry operating system and Apple's iPhone were behind at about 25 percent of the market each.
Overall, BlackBerry continues to dominate the smart-phone market for new and longer-term consumers with 31 percent of all sales. But that portion is down from 36 percent in January. Google's Android sales have more than doubled from 8 percent to 19 percent of all customers.
Fierce competition is not only being displayed in sales but in patent disputes between phone makers. Microsoft, which has trailed all operating systems, sued Motorola for allegedly infringing smart-phone patents related to e-mail, calendar and other applications. Apple and HTC have a back-and-forth patents dispute. In March, Apple sued Taiwan-based HTC, the manufacturer of such Android phones as the HTC Hero and Google's Nexus One (since taken off the market), alleging that it had infringed on 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone's user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.
Separately, Apple was ordered by a Texas jury to pay more than $625 million to a computer science professor for alleged patent infringements.
Lula supporter dominates Brazil vote - MiamiHerald.com
RIO DE JANEIRO -- President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's hand-picked successor failed to win the presidency in national elections Sunday, but analysts predicted an easy victory when Brazilians return to the pollsOct. 31.
With 91 percent of votes counted late Sunday, Dilma Rousseff, a guerilla-turned-bureaucrat and the daughter of Bulgarian immigrants, had received 46.7 percent in a nine-candidate field. She needed 50 percent to avoid a runoff.
Rousseff heads into the second round against José Serra, a former governor and government minister, who received 32 percent.
In the months ahead of the election, several polls had predicted that Rousseff, riding Lula da Silva's 80 percent popularity wave, would win the presidency outright, avoiding the runoff. The latest, by O Globo television network right before the election, had shown Rousseff at 51 percent.
``I think it is a defeat not to win in the first round,'' says Arthur Ituassu, a professor of social communication at the Pontifícia Universade Católica in Rio de Janeiro. ``But she is in a very strong position. . . . The chances are that she will win in the second round.''
Rousseff's failure to win the presidency on Sunday may be due to the emergence of two corruption scandals, analysts said.
The Green Party's Marina Silva, herself a former activist and environment minister for Lula and native of the remote Amazonian state of Acre, came in third with nearly 20 percent. Final pre-election polls had put her only as high as 17 percent.
Over the next four weeks, the battle will be for voters who supported Silva. She is likely to throw her support to Serra or stay neutral, said David Fleischer, a professor of political science at the University of Brasília.
The former environment minister had resigned from Lula da Silva's cabinet and there is ``no love lost'' between her and Rousseff, Fleischer says.
During the campaign, many said that Serra and Rousseff lacked the charisma of Lula da Silva, who has had huge success in turning around the Brazilian economy over eight years.
The largest country in Latin America is also one of the most prosperous, and Lula da Silva has been credited with lifting 21 million Brazilians out of poverty. The country was also awarded the 2014 Soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
Lula da Silva, however, had been criticized for his close relations to Iran. The issue has come up in the debates but has not been much of a factor in the campaign.
Serra has always said that his goal was to get into a runoff.
``We're going to lead to victory in the campaign in the second round,'' said the Brazilian Social Democracy party candidate and former minister in the cabinet of Lula da Silva's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
`NEW BALL GAME'
``We're going to have a completely new ball game'' with campaigning now, said Alexandre Barros, managing director of the Brasília political consultancy Early Warning Consulting.
This is the first election since the return to democracy in 1985 -- after 21 years of military dictatorship -- where Lula da Silva's name has not been on the ballot. The constitution bars him from running for a third consecutive term.
Since the campaign officially began in July, Rousseff was first viewed skeptically as an unknown since she had never run for public office. But from initial voter support for her in the upper-30 percent, she rose to above the 50 percent mark in September.
Two corruption scandals that emerged in recent weeks then began chipping away at her air of inevitability.
In one, members of her party were accused of illegally accessing the tax records of Serra's family. In the second scandal, one of Rousseff's and Lula da Silva's top aide's family was accused of running an influence-peddling scheme to secure government contracts.
`PERCEPTION'
``The perception was that if Lula [da Silva] had acted faster [to remove the implicated aide], voters would have been certain that he took a step in the good direction, the ethics direction,'' Barros said. ``As it took time, this gave people time to doubt. . . . [Though] the people who defected were fewer'' than many expected.
Still, many voters seemed unperturbed by the allegations and saw Rousseff as a replacement to Lula da Silva even if they were not enthusiastic about the candidate herself.
``When it's election season, I don't think much about these things [allegations of scandal],'' said Maria Luiza after voting in the Martin Luther King municipal school.
Luiza said she is ``very suspicious'' about why the allegations came out in the midst of the campaign.
Obama's new chief of staff gets Saturday Night Live impersonator - USA Today
Giants' defense batters Cutler, Bears - msnbc.com


Tea Parties Turn Pragmatic in Bid to Advance Agendas - Wall Street Journal
RICHMOND, Va.—The tea-party movement is turning more professional.
Around the country, tea-party groups are building increasingly sophisticated political organizations and overcoming early bickering to push legislative platforms, elect their own delegates, shake up statehouses and even form alliances with the Republican Party establishment they profess to dislike.
Nowhere is this evolution more vivid than in Virginia, where a federation of more than 30 groups scattered across the state now has the ear of the Republican governor, top state legislators and the state's congressional delegation.
The Federation of Virginia Tea Party Patriots helped push legislation through the Virginia Statehouse earlier this year to blunt the impact of the new federal health-care law. It is now allying with like-minded lawmakers to champion an ambitious roster of bills.
In a show of strength, the group will host a two-day policy convention starting Friday in Richmond that looks set to be the largest state tea-party gathering of its kind to date.
Similar coordinating efforts are underway in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Virginia, Texas and Ohio.
For much of the past year, the meteoric rise of the tea-party movement has struck many as a threat to the Republican establishment. But in state after state, tea-party groups are putting the fireworks aside to form at least temporary alliances with the GOP as they strengthen their own organizations. Many of these groups are already looking beyond the November midterm elections and plotting strategies for legislative sessions and local elections next year.
The result could help determine the tea party's longevity.
"What we are witnessing is a very authentic grass-roots movement," said Ned Ryun, president of Virginia-based American Majority, a group that trains conservative activists and candidates. "But without a lasting fabric, these groups will have trouble keeping the passion alive into the future." Mr. Ryan's group has opened activist-training offices in Texas, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
The success of local tea-party organizations promises to transform the GOP and statehouses, regardless of whether the high-profile candidates who have stolen the headlines so far, such as Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharon Angle in Nevada, win or lose.
Schisms and tensions still abound, both among tea-party groups and between various tea-party organizations and the GOP. In some contests, tea-party candidates have confounded Republican hopes, notably for Delaware's Senate seat. And the alliances could break down after November's midterm elections. But for now, the emerging picture in many parts of the country is one of pragmatism and cooperation.
These kinds of organizational alliances are likely to boost Republican efforts. Republicans have turned out in far higher numbers than Democrats in primaries across the country, while a Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll last month found that 71% of Republicans saw themselves as tea-party supporters.
In Missouri, activist groups have backed seven-term Republican Rep. Roy Blunt in his bid for the Senate, despite his votes for legislation, including the 2008 bank bailout, which the groups usually abhor.
In Ohio, nearly all of the state's limited-government groups have banded together under the banner of the Ohio Liberty Council, a loose-knit federation of more than 50 groups. The group has formed a political-action committee to actively support candidates, and is pushing initiatives to block the health-care bill in the state and to end the Ohio estate tax.
The council has feuded openly with the state's Republican Party, which pulled out the stops in May to defeat a slate of candidates the council supported for positions on the party's central committee. "The Republicans hate us, just hate us," said Chris Littleton, the council's president.
Still, the group has decided to put the fight aside to support nearly all of the top Republican candidates, including John Kasich for governor and Rob Portman for Senate. The group is also operating phone banks and other get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of half a dozen GOP House candidates.
In Pennsylvania, another statewide tea-party group, the Pennsylvania Coalition for Responsible Government, is backing Republican candidates across the board and has rallied activists to oppose several bills in the state legislature, with mixed results. The group is marshalling support to overhaul the state's budget process and to reduce the amount of time the state legislature is in session.
"At first we focused on Washington, but now we are turning to what is wrong in Pennsylvania," said the coalition's president, Greg Wrightstone. (For the next elections, in 2012, that might include a number of Republican incumbents.)
Virginia's statewide tea-party alliance is perhaps the most advanced of any in the country, both in organization and in its own interactions with the GOP.
Its convention this weekend is expected to draw the cream of the state Republican Party and at least 3,000 participants. The state's top three Republicans—Gov. Bob McDonnell, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and Attorney Gen. Ken Cuccinelli—all agreed to attend and field questions, but as mere panelists, not keynote speakers.
"The party is trying to mollify the tea-party folks, if only as a protective measure," says Mr. Cuccinelli, who rose to office last year with the support of thousands of tea-party activists.
Messrs. McDonnell and Bolling see it differently. "I am going because I am driven, and the tea-party members are driven, by the same ideas," says Mr. McDonnell. Mr. Bolling says his message to the convention will be "that we stand with them and we appreciate their involvement in the political process."
Several events have helped to push Virginia to the vanguard of a national tea-party movement. A huge sales-tax increase in 2004, passed with the help of Republican votes, stirred a rebellion among the party's base and helped propel a new crop of conservatives to power last November, including Messrs. McDonnell, Bolling and Cuccinelli.
The 2009 state election, coming a year after Virginia helped elect President Barack Obama, was an early display of voter angst over Obama administration policies. The election also gave impetus and focus to the dozens of Virginia tea-party groups that sprang up last year.
By early autumn, many were eager to aim higher. "We realized we could stay local but still have more power if we worked together," says Jamie Radtke, a mother of three who has been a driving force behind the statewide organization as head of the Richmond Tea Party.
Meeting last October in the back room of a fishing-tackle shop in Ashland, Va., Ms. Radtke and the heads of a dozen other groups took the first steps to form a statewide tea-party federation. With each of the groups leery of losing its autonomy, they kept the organization loose—formal meetings once a quarter, conference calls once every two weeks.
By December they had a board, a set of leaders, and a mission: to pass legislation against the Obama administration's health-care overhaul, which was then struggling forward in Congress.
The federation found lawmakers to sponsor and move the bill. In January, hundreds of activists converged on Richmond to lobby for it. The bill, which seeks to block the federal mandate that all Virginians must buy health insurance, passed the General Assembly in March, with some support from Democrats.
The federation has had its setbacks and inner struggles. One bill the group pushed, to lift all restrictions on buying firearms made in Virginia, stalled in the General Assembly.
For months, one of its members, the Roanoke Tea Party, pushed for a proposal that would limit the federal government's ability to impose new rules and mandates on Virginia—an issue being taken up by similar groups across the country.
But the Roanoke group wanted the act to include what is known as the right of interposition, a colonial-era doctrine first advanced by James Madison that argues individual states should preserve the power to block any federal law seen as objectionable.
The federation objected, and Attorney Gen. Cuccinelli, in private consultations with the Roanoke group, agreed, noting how Southern states had unsuccessfully invoked the doctrine in the 1960s to resist federal civil-rights legislation.
"Interposition had a place in history, I told them, and it is not an exalted one," Mr. Cuccinelli said.
The federation, which ultimately nixed the interposition doctrine, plans to unveil its legislative agenda for next year at this weekend's convention. Topping the list will be a drive, also underway in a number of other states, to push a constitutional amendment that would allow states to overturn an act of Congress if two-thirds of states vote to oppose it.
The governor and other top Republicans have agreed to support the so-called Repeal Act after a series of back-channel discussions with the tea-party federation. "We very much see eye-to-eye on the issue of federalism," said Mr. McDonnell.
The cooperation came after a bitter primary season. This spring, in the state's sprawling fifth congressional district, five tea-party candidates spent months blasting the Republican favorite, state Sen. Robert Hurt, as a tax-hiking career politician.
The day after Mr. Hurt won the Republican nomination in June, all but one of the vanquished joined Mr. Hurt for a unity rally in Charlottesville. The lone holdout, local businessman Jim McKelvey, issued his own endorsement two months later after Mr. Hurt pledged—in private talks between the two camps—to never vote for a tax hike, to steer clear of all earmarks, and to push for an audit of the Federal Reserve.
Bill Stanley, the Fifth District's new GOP chairman, helped broker the peace. The tea-party movement and the Republican establishment, he said, are essentially following the same tune, "but both sides are not yet dancing the same dance."
At a recent board meeting of the Richmond Tea Party, held in its three-room headquarters in a strip mall west of the city, Ms. Radtke updated the group on a series of private talks they've had with area congressmen.
The most recent sit-down was with Richmond Rep. Eric Cantor, who would serve as Republican majority leader if the GOP wins control of the House next month. Mr. Cantor has reached out to the group, despite declining to join the House's new Tea Party Caucus. "He made clear that we won't always agree, but he supported our aims," Ms. Radtke said.
The congressman also provided the cellphone numbers of his chief of staff and other top aides.
The Richmond group now has a formal five-person board, about 200 organizers and thousands of supporters. The entire assembly is up for re-election next year, and the federation is already working to identify candidates.
"This year, we had little choice but to support the candidates we were dealt," said Ms. Radtke. "In the future we hope to be more selective."
Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com
Gliese 581g, New Planet Discovered 2010, New Earth? - Gossip Jackal
New Planet Found 20 Light Years Away
Earlier this week, Astronomers discovered a new planet, Gilese 581G. According to astronomers, this new planet could actual have inhabitants, as it is close to earth in its attributes, however it’s daytime on the planet all throughout the year, the sun shines continuously 24 hours a day.
Even though evidence show that the planet can sustain extraterrestrial life, astronomers still do not know if the planet has any form of intelligent life. Edward Seidel from The National Science Foundation stated, “If we do discover life outside our planet, it would perhaps be the most significant discovery of all time.
Gliese 581g is 20 light years away from the Earth, so it may be years before any more information is known about the planer or if the is other life forms out there.

McNabb earns one of his sweetest wins - FOXSports.com
Donovan McNabb couldn’t keep the poker face forever.
Amid massive media hype, McNabb had masterfully downplayed the personal revenge factor entering Sunday’s game at Philadelphia. Even some of McNabb’s new Washington Redskins teammates didn’t know just how badly their quarterback wanted to prove the Eagles erred by trading him this offseason — especially to a division rival.
McNabb, though, did crack following a 17-12 victory. And he did so in an unfamiliar setting: the visiting locker room McNabb had never before frequented at Lincoln Financial Field.
After being presented the game ball by Redskins coach Mike Shanahan, McNabb expressed the emotion behind closed doors that he wouldn’t share publicly.
“Everybody makes mistakes in their lifetime,” he said. “(The Eagles) made one last (offseason).”
For at least one game, McNabb was right.
Not that he was going to disclose such sentiment with outsiders. McNabb refused to elaborate on his postgame speech during a meager four-minute news conference. However, McNabb did confess to a sense of relief after being squarely in the NFL spotlight for an entire week.
“You couldn’t watch any TV without people talking about (me) coming back to Philadelphia,” McNabb said. “One thing I didn’t want my teammates to see was the fact it became a distraction for me. I tried to go through the same regimen. Those guys saw me in the locker room laughing and joking. I thought today we were a truly focused bunch.”
That bunch is more responsible than McNabb for this victory.
He wouldn’t have bragging rights without a strong Redskins running game — Ryan Torain and Clinton Portis combined for 125 yards and one touchdown — and a solid defensive effort. McNabb’s second-half play was abysmal after a strong start. He completed only two of 11 passes for 10 yards as Washington couldn’t add to a 17-6 halftime lead.
The performance would have justified Philadelphia’s decision to cut ties with McNabb — provided the Eagles had won and gotten more productivity under center Sunday.
Michael Vick went down with a rib/chest injury at the end of the first quarter and didn’t return. That pushed Kevin Kolb into action for the first time since he was hurt in the season-opener.
The player originally projected as McNabb’s replacement justified Eagles coach Andy Reid’s decision to stick with Vick in the starting lineup even when Kolb was healthy. None of Kolb’s 22 completions gained more than 18 yards. On the rare occasions that wide receivers DeSean Jackson and Jeremy Maclin escaped tight coverage from Washington’s secondary, Kolb already had locked onto shorter passes to running backs and tight ends.
The tentative Kolb played like a quarterback with only three career starts. The Redskins also knew Kolb wasn’t the same caliber rushing threat as Vick, whose timetable for a return is currently unknown.
“When things broke down, Kolb ran but (Vick) would have gotten some first downs,” Redskins free safety Kareem Moore said.
Kolb and Vick both got little support from an Eagles squad that committed far too many mental mistakes and penalties (eight for 80 yards). Reid is among the goats. He got the offense flagged for delay-of-game on a fourth down from the Redskins 1-yard line by not getting a play into Kolb on time. The Eagles (2-2) were then forced to settle for a field goal right before halftime.
Wide receiver Jason Avant made an even bigger gaffe. He bobbled what would have been the game-winning touchdown pass on the final snap. DeAngelo Hall intercepted Kolb’s desperation throw to seal the victory.
McNabb raised his hands in the air to celebrate and then walked to midfield for a hug with Reid, his coach and mentor for 11 seasons. McNabb also received an embrace en route from smiling Redskins linebacker London Fletcher.
“We had a little extra motivation: To come in here and get a victory against a team that basically said, ‘You’re not good enough. This is what we think of you: We’ll trade you within the division,'" Fletcher said. “Today, he got the best of them.”
Fletcher tried to make McNabb comfortable before the game. Walking to the pregame coin toss, Fletcher told McNabb that he and the Redskins “were going to do this together.”
“He knew that,” Fletcher said, “but I just wanted to reiterate it to him, let him know we’ve got your back.”
By that time, McNabb’s head was spinning. He seemed to spend as much time before kickoff saying hello to friends and former Eagles teammates as warming up. After his name was read over the public address system in pregame introductions, McNabb received a standing ovation from the Eagles fans with whom he shared a love-hate relationship.
Eagles faithful loved the fact McNabb led the team to five NFC Championship games and set the franchise’s major passing records. They hated the fact he never won a Super Bowl.
At age 34, the championship window may have closed for McNabb. The Eagles thought so by shipping him to Washington for a second-round draft pick. McNabb’s best moments — a 31-yard touchdown strike to tight end Chris Cooley, a 57-yard bomb to Anthony Armstrong and an 18-yard scramble for a key fourth-quarter first down — were eclipsed by his ineffectiveness as the game unfolded. While saddled with largely mediocre offensive talent in Washington (2-2), McNabb has yet to show he can raise the play of those around him.
McNabb, though, deserves to enjoy this moment for coming through in such a high-pressure situation. This victory further cemented his leadership status on a new team. And while he will never admit this, it didn’t hurt for McNabb to show he’s human after all.
“It was the first time I had really heard him say that (the Eagles) made a mistake by letting him go,” Cooley said. “Just to let that out I’m sure felt good for him. It was cool that he could express how he felt.”
Finally.
Mark Zuckerberg's Most Valuable Friend - New York Times
EVERY Monday a bit before 10 a.m., Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, dashes off a quick e-mail to her boss, Mark Zuckerberg. “We have a routine,” Ms. Sandberg says. “I e-mail, ‘Coming in?’ He replies, ‘On my way.’ ”
A few minutes later, Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, walks into the company’s headquarters here, says a few hellos and heads to a conference room where he and Ms. Sandberg huddle for an hour. The two executives end the week the same way, with a closed-door meeting on Friday afternoon. They discuss products, strategy, deals, personnel — and each other.
“We agreed that we would give each other feedback every Friday,” Ms. Sandberg says. “We are constantly flagging things. Nothing ever builds up.” At a recent meeting, for instance, they ironed out a disagreement between them over the details of Mr. Zuckerberg’s pledge to give $100 million to schools in Newark.
If all of that sounds a bit touchy-feely, well, it is. Ms. Sandberg, a well-regarded Internet executive, is known for her interpersonal skills as much as for her sharp intellect. And her regular meetings with the famously introverted Mr. Zuckerberg have helped to keep one of Silicon Valley’s most unusual business partnerships working wonders for Facebook.
Indeed, for a variety of reasons, Ms. Sandberg may well have become Mr. Zuckerberg’s most valuable friend.
Since Ms. Sandberg joined the company more than two years ago, Facebook has successfully navigated one of the more perilous stages in a start-up’s life: a period of hypergrowth. Facebook’s work force has expanded sixfold, to nearly 1,800, and its global audience has multiplied by more than seven, to half a billion. Revenue, once little more than an afterthought, is expected to balloon to around $1.6 billion this year, according to estimates from Wedbush Securities. (Facebook, a private company, doesn’t disclose its revenue.)
Part of the reason for that sales growth is Ms. Sandberg’s close ties to many of the world’s largest advertisers, relationships she first developed as a senior executive at Google. Ms. Sandberg also brought stability to Facebook, which had suffered from a long period of turmoil and the departure of several executives and early employees, including the company’s other co-founders.
“One of the reasons the company is doing so well is because the two of them get along so well,” says Mike Schroepfer, vice president for engineering.
Ms. Sandberg has focused on building the business, expanding internationally, cultivating relationships with large advertisers and putting her polish on things like communications and public policy. That has freed Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on what he likes best: the Facebook Web site and its platform.
Donald Graham, the chairman of the Washington Post Company, who once tried to hire Ms. Sandberg, says that in the last two years a lot of questions about Facebook’s viability have been put to rest.
“The combination of Mark and Sheryl is the primary reason,” says Mr. Graham, who is also a member of Facebook’s board.
These days, Ms. Sandberg is also juggling another duty: mounting a defense of Mr. Zuckerberg at a time when a new movie, “The Social Network,” portrays him as an aloof and conniving student who may have stolen the idea for Facebook from others. Ms. Sandberg will have none of that.
“He is shy and introverted and he often does not seem very warm to people who don’t know him, but he is warm,” Ms. Sandberg says of Mr. Zuckerberg, her voice rising with empathy. “He really cares about the people who work here.”
She can be just as protective of Mr. Zuckerberg in private.
At a technology conference this summer, for instance, Mr. Zuckerberg flopped during an onstage interview. He gave rambling answers to questions about Facebook’s privacy policies, became visibly nervous and started sweating profusely. After the interview, Ms. Sandberg encouraged him not to beat himself up over it, but to focus on parts of the interview that went well so he could do better next time, according to people briefed on their interaction who didn’t want to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
“She really wants him to succeed,” says one of these people.
For all her achievements, there’s one area where Ms. Sandberg’s influence has yet to work its magic: privacy concerns. While Ms. Sandberg is not ultimately responsible for the features on the Facebook site — that’s Mr. Zuckerberg’s job — she is deeply involved in the planning that revolves around them. She readily acknowledges that Facebook has made mistakes.
“It is completely fair to say that we have had our challenges around privacy,” she says.