Elections

A proposed law allowing the government to pull the plug on Web sites accused of aiding piracy received a sizable political boost yesterday.

Dozens of the largest content companies, including video game maker Activision, media firms NBC Universal and Viacom, and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) endorsed the bill in a letter to the U.S. Senate. So did Major League Baseball and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and co-sponsor of the bill, said new laws are needed to curb access … Read more

President Barack Obama met yesterday with two ascendant Silicon Valley powers: Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google VP Marissa Mayer.

With Jobs, Obama discussed American competitiveness and education, according to Reuters.

The president's visit to the home of Mayer and husband Zachary Bogue was for a $30,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner less than two weeks before mid-term elections, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Obama had good timing for catching people on the upswing.

Jobs this week revealed sleek new MacBook Air computers and announced Apple's quarterly profit of $4.31 billion.

Mayer--who is vice president of geographic and local … Read more

When you're running for governor and suggesting that perhaps your expertise in having run eBay will be much needed to sort out California, it is good to ensure that you have your tweets all in a row.

Some were frightfully amused that, Sarah Pompei, a spokeswoman for Meg Whitman, sent out a tweet that purported to link to an endorsement from the Deputy Sheriffs' Association of San Diego County but instead linked to the clip I have embedded.

Her tweet had read: "SD Cnty Sheriff Assoc says @Whitman2010 4 gov! RT: @Murphy4MegNews: CA Cops get it: Jerry Brown … Read more

For a few days this month, with midterm election season heating up, the Internet's army of bored office drones cast aside their usual YouTube fodder of strangely-behaving cats and all things lip-synced and Auto-Tuned. They turned instead to what may or may not have been a completely serious political campaign ad: fresh-faced Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell took to the airwaves, and to the Web, with a spot that began with the proclamation, "I'm not a witch."

There's a backstory, of course. As an evangelical Christian activist appearing on the 1990s talk show "… Read more

ASPEN, Co.--Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive at Hewlett-Packard, on Monday promised a deregulatory approach toward technology if elected to the U.S. Senate, warning of governmental overreach on Net neutrality and saying that current politicians don't understand what's important to Silicon Valley.

Fiorina, who won the Republican nomination in June, echoed what many technology executives have said for years: America's skilled-worker visa system is so badly broken that "we have to start from scratch," and that too many government policies push jobs overseas instead of making U.S. companies competitive against international rivals. … Read more

A controversial, religiously charged post on conservative political figurehead Sarah Palin's official Facebook page has disappeared--and a grassroots campaign to have it pulled from the social network may be responsible.

Palin, the former governor of Alaska and a possible contender for a 2012 presidential nomination, used her Facebook page as the outlet for a "note" in which she came out forcefully against plans for a mosque to be built in New York just a few blocks away from the site of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which were carried out by Muslim extremists. "To build … Read more

Graphics in a political attack ad for California gubernatorial candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman that imitated popular humor blog FailBlog aren't going over too well with Cheezburger Network, the amalgam of blogs that owns FailBlog.

"We are talking to our attorneys on this," Cheezburger Network founder and CEO Ben Huh told CNET via e-mail. "We haven't decided on a course of action, if any. The law is a complex beast."

Huh's comment followed a post he wrote Friday on FailBlog, in which he addressed the fact that a recent video campaign … Read more

Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, two ex-Silicon Valley executives who pledged to use their business acumen to address economic problems, handily won their respective Republican nominations for governor and U.S. Senate in California's primary election on Tuesday.

Their primary victories are likely to lead to a bruising and expensive general election campaign against their Democratic rivals: onetime Gov. Jerry Brown, who is seeking to reclaim his old job, and incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer, who has been in the U.S. Congress for nearly 28 years.

"Californians have had enough of a government that is out of control, … Read more

California Democrats will decide Tuesday whether a former Facebook executive will have a shot at becoming state attorney general.

Chris Kelly, former chief privacy officer of the social network, is up against San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris in the party's primary. The winner will go on to the general election in November.

Kelly has earned the support of many deep-pocketed Valley types, including other current and former Facebook executives, and has cited his law-and-order role at a successful company as evidence that he can take on this role of attorney general in the most populous state. Meanwhile, Harris … Read more