81-year-old Warren Buffett — one of he richest men on the planet — got downright gangsta at the grand reopening of Jay Z’s 40/40 nightclub in NYC last night … throwin’ up the Roc-a-Fella sign … like a boss.
It was the first time Jay’s been out in public since the birth of his daughter Blue Ivy — though Beyonce and B.I. didn’t make it out to the party.
Jay and Buffett have been friends for years — and appeared on the cover of Forbes together back in 2010.
An earlier Biden gaffe, asking a man in a wheelchair to stand up
Vice President Joe Biden had his “oops” moment Wednesday speaking in a 49er-crazed San Francisco when he told a crowd at a city political fundraiser that “the Giants are on their way to the Super Bowl.”
Biden spoke at a closed event in the city’s financial District at the Bently Reserve when he made the gaffe, according to a White House pool report released today.
The comment by Biden drew immediate “good-natured” boos from the crowd, according to the report by Josh Richman of the Oakland Tribune, who was the only local print reporter allowed to cover the event.
After suggesting that the Giants were heading to the Super Bowl, Biden quickly recognized the gaffe and and explained he was accustomed to thinking in terms of the San Francisco Giants and their baseball wins. His next reference was to the “49ers on their way” to the Big Game.
Richman reported he was ushered out of the fundraiser after Biden started taking a few questions from the audience of about 110 campaign contributors. “The event raised somewhere between $275,000 and $1.1 million,” according to his report.
The event was one of several stops Biden and his wife made in the Bay Area today.
Biden plans to meet this evening with local tech leaders, including the heads of Apple, Google, Yahoo, Netflix and Zynga, but those meetings are not open to the media, the White House said.
Comments »http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3geCP9rNUrU
It’s official … DMX and his legendary rap crew Ruff Ryders are getting back together — in fact, X tells TMZ, a blowout reunion tour is already in the works.
Ruff Ryders first lady Eve told us this weekend to expect a massive comeback — but X says the RR reunion is already underway … with CEO Waah Dean currently booking several venues across the country.
The tour is supposed to kick off in a few months — and X tells us, the entire crew’s already on board, including Swizz Beats, Drag-On, and Murda-Mook.
According to DMX, Eve and The L.O.X. haven’t signed on yet — but that’s just because he hasn’t gotten in touch with them yet. X insists, that will change very soon.
X tells us, “We are all family and we’re going to come back stronger than when we left … It’s going to take the nation by storm.”
Comments »“The US economy may be on the verge of a big comeback. It could experience an unusual second recovery over the next three years following the weak initial recovery of the past three years. In the past, recessions were followed by one broad-based recovery in economic activity. The Naysayers have been predicting a “double dip” recession for the US economy since it started to recover in 2009. I’m suggesting that a more likely scenario might be a double back-to-back recovery.”
Read the rest, and see some pretty graphs, here.
Comments »Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.
One myth about the surge in federal government spending over the last four years is that it was an automatic response to the recession. But the “tests” that beneficiaries of various government safety-net programs are required to pass before they can participate have gotten easier since 2007.
Read the rest here.
Comments »(via DrudgeReport.com)
(Drudge gets the big scoop again)
Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview. Earlier this week, she sat before ABCNEWS cameras, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
She spoke to ABCNEWS reporter Brian Ross for two hours.
Her explosive revelations are set to rock the campaign.
But now a “civil war” has erupted inside of the network, an insider claims, on exactly when the confession will air!
ABCNEWS suits determined it would be “unethical” to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates.
A decision was tentatively made to air the interview next Monday, after all votes have been counted.
Gingrich canceled a press conference on Wednesday to deal with the matter.
“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” Marianne Gingrich, Newt’s wife of 18 years, explained to ESQUIRE last year. “When you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are.”
MORE
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Bill Clinton, the original “comeback kid” doesn’t see much hope for a resurgence by Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, dissing him in a new interview as a Romney clone because of issues the former speaker has flip-flopped on.
Clinton, who is on the cover of the upcoming issue of Esquire, puts down the speaker who has bragged on the campaign trail of how he worked with Clinton to reform welfare and balance the budget.[Check out the latest political cartoons.]
Clinton doesn’t giving any love back. In an excerpt provided to Whispers, the former president says, “As a private citizen he was for certain important health-care reforms and believed in climate change and believed there had to be a strong reaction to it. And now he’s just like Romney. Neither one of them can say what they believe to be true and get nominated. Romney’s still trying to figure out what he did as governor of Massachusetts and still appeal to this driving vituperative energy.”
Bubba also takes a shot at the GOP culture, charging that the Republican side of aisle has given up any pretence of moderation and bipartisanship. His key example is how Jon Huntsman was run out of the Republican primaries because voters saw him as a moderate and didn’t respond well to his work as PresidentObama’s ambassador to China.
“Huntsman’s economic record — and his positions on the abortion issue and other things — is every bit as conservative and considerably more consistent than the two front-runners. But he also doesn’t make any bones about being willing to work with people and thinking you ought to put your country first. When the president asks you to serve — to go to China, and you speak Mandarin Chinese and you think you can help American business and America’s national strategic interest by doing it — you do it.”
“But all of a sudden that’s disqualifying. So I think that it shows you, we’re, you know, we’re living in a time when the Republicans have only pushed harder and harder to the right. And every time the president adopts a plan that they once advocated, they abandon it and push farther to the right. But the voters can push them back.”
Comments »The United States is becoming less economically competitive versus other nations, with political gridlock and a weak primary education system seen as the main drag, according to a survey released on Wednesday.
In particular, the nation is falling behind emerging market rivals and just keeping pace with other advanced economies, according to a Harvard Business School survey of 9,750 of its alumni in the United States and 121 other countries.
Seventy-one percent of respondents expected the U.S. to become less competitive, less able to compete in the global economy with U.S. firms less able to pay high wages and benefits, the study found.
The findings come at a time when high unemployment is a major concern for Americans, with 23.7 million out-of-work and underemployed, and the economy the top issue ahead of November’s presidential election.
“The U.S. is losing out on business location decisions at an alarming rate” said Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor who was a co-author of the study.
U.S. companies, which slashed headcount sharply during the 2007-2009 recession, have been slow to rehire since the downturn’s official end and some have continued to cut. This month, Archer Daniels Midland Co (ADM.N), Kraft Foods Inc (KFT.N) and Novartis AG NOVN.XV all said they would be cutting U.S. jobs this year.
Survey respondents said they remained more likely to move operations out of the United States than back in. Of 1,005 who considered offshoring facilities in the past year, 51 percent decided to move versus just 10 percent who opted to keep their facilities in the country, with the balance not yet decided.
Respondents, graduates of the prestigious business school who were polled from October 4 through November 4, were particularly concerned about how the United States was shaping up versus emerging nations such as China, Brazil and India, with 66 percent saying the United States was falling behind.
WEAK POINTS
Among respondents who had decided to move operations out of the United States over the past year, 70 percent cited lower wages as the reason they chose a new location, pointing to what is widely seen as emerging markets’ main advantage.
While the United States held up better compared to other advanced economies, with about 70 percent saying it was keeping pace competitively, 21 percent said the U.S. was also falling behind other wealthy countries, such as those in Western Europe and Japan.
The United States’ main disadvantages compared with other advanced economies were the complexity of its tax code, the ineffectiveness of its political system and the weakness of its educational system from kindergarten through high school.
Higher education fared better, with respondents citing high-quality universities as the nation’s top competitive advantage.
Asked what the U.S. government could do to improve its competitive position, respondents top recommendations were to simplify the tax code, reform immigration policies and reduce the corporate tax rate.
Comments »
Mark Wahlberg claims he could have done what hundreds of other doomed passengers couldn’t … fought off the multiple 9/11 hijackers and saved Flight 93.
Wahlberg just gave an interview with Men’s Journal … in which he states, “If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.'”
So the question … is Wahlberg’s braggadocio insulting to the dead passengers and their families?
Comments »
Goldman Sachs set aside $12.2bn (£8bn) to pay its staff in 2011 – an average of $367,000 each – sparking criticism that the Wall Street firm was living in a “parallel universe”.
The size of the payouts sparked a backlash from unions, who regard them as evidence that David Cameron’s government should take steps to ensure top pay is better linked to performance. Campaigners for a “Robin Hood tax” on transactions said it backed their case for new levies on banks.
“When even in a bad year each Goldman employee pockets an average of $367,000 – nearly ten times the average UK salary – it’s proof that banks live in a parallel universe to the rest of us,” a spokesman for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, said.
Goldman used a greater proportion of its revenue (42%) to pay its 33,000 staff in 2011 compared with 39% a year ago. The firm axed 7% – 2,400 – of its staff during the year and those who remain will begin to learn the size of their annual bonuses in the coming days.
The highest profile firm on Wall Street reported better than expected full year revenue of $28.8bn – down 26% – while earnings almost halved to $4.4bn prompting Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman, to blame “global macro-economic concerns” for the fall..
The total payout per staff of $367,000 – a figure which includes salaries, bonuses, equity awards and benefits – was down 15% on the $430,000 the previous year. The actual amount set side to pay staff at $12.2bn was down 21%.
David Viniar, Goldman’s finance director, insisted that “discretionary” bonuses were down “considerably more than revenues” during the year and said the firm had embarked on a strategy to cut $1.4bn of costs.
But TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “Goldman Sachs are brazenly defying their own sliding profits by dishing out pay and top bonuses worth £240k a head. This latest example of excessive rewards for mediocrity should give the government the green light to get tough on top pay. Ministers should start by putting workers on remuneration committees and making pay and bonuses exceeding £260,000 liable for corporation tax.”
The firm has recently provided more disclosure than in the past about its pay deals in the UK as a result of rules set out by the Financial Services Authority requiring firms to publish pay for “code staff” – those taking or managing risk. Regulatory filings for Goldman Sachs Group Holdings (UK) show that it had 95 code staff in 2010 who had an average pay deal of $6.2m (£4m) in 2010 – and had a further $595m awarded in a one-off mid-year award of shares in 2010.
“This past year was dominated by global macroeconomic concerns which significantly affected our clients’ risk tolerance and willingness to transact,” Blankfein said.
“As economies and markets improve – and we see encouraging signs of this – Goldman Sachs is very well positioned to perform for our clients and our shareholders,” he added. The turmoil in the eurozone held back many of its business areas. Revenues in investment banking were down 9% while its business that underwrites share offerings was down 14%. Its fixed income, currency and commodities operations suffered a 34% fall in revenue. “Although activity levels in 2011 were generally consistent with 2010 levels, and results were solid during the first quarter of 2011, the environment during the remainder of 2011 was characterised by broad market concerns and uncertainty, resulting in volatile trading and significantly wider credit spreads, which contributed to difficult market-making conditions and led to reductions in risk by the firm and its clients,” the firm said.
Comments »I’m posting a letter to the editor from a shocked Saints fan that ran in the Tuesday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle because it deserves a broader community discussion. The letter, written by Don Moses of Mill Valley, describes ugly and profane epithets hurled at him and his two teenage daughters when they went to Saturday’s 49ers game against the New Orleans Saints. Moses decries the combative fan culture. His was not the only letter The Chronicle received from horrified Saints fans.
Another Saints fan who was at the game posted this on a New Orleans life website.
What do you think?
– Lois Kazakoff, deputy editorial page editor
Ugly side of 49ers’ big game
Letters to the editor, Jan. 17
I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 25 years but have remained a staunch Saints fan with close ties to New Orleans. My family still lives in New Orleans and has held our season tickets since 1967. I “get” the emotion of the game, the moment and the enthusiasm of the 49er fans.
Despite the extraordinary setting at the ’Stick, we were shocked by the hostility, vulgarity and intimidation that rained down on me and my two teenage daughters from the moment we stepped into the parking lots. Yes, we were proudly wearing our Saints colors; that’s what loyal fans do. And yes, we expected some good-natured jeering.
We had vulgarities screamed at us repeatedly in the parking lots and literally nonstop by the hooligans around us in the stands. While walking through the lots we had footballs thrown at us, guys screaming curses in our faces — my daughters asked if I had heard the guy who yelled “your mother’s a whore,” which I had, but couldn’t show a reaction for fear for my daughters’ and my own safety. We finally took to shadowing two cops that were strolling through the lots until we dashed for what we thought would be the relative sanity of the stadium.
The stadium was no better. Every other word from dozens of fans around us was an f-bomb shouted at the top of their lungs. There were seven or eight large 30- to 35-year-old guys directly behind us who cursed and threatened us the entire game. After one string of profanities I turned around to look at them and the most obnoxious and combative of the bunch yelled, “Do not turn around again! Do not ever turn around again” and punctuated it with a profanity. They used gay slurs repeatedly at the husband of a middle-aged couple in front of us, the only other Saints fan in our area, and called his wife a bitch.
One of my daughters asked me, “Why don’t you do something, Daddy?” Do what? Fight 10 guys, call/text security when all those guys behind me would know who would have fingered them?
Leave early? We almost did.
The hostility and threats of violence were a constant throughout our experience. It appeared to be ingrained in the fans’ culture, similar to the hooliganism that destroyed the reputation of English soccer. The long wait for the playoffs, the excitement of a big game? No excuse. I’ve been to big games in venues around the world and believe me, I’ve been a Saints fan my whole life so I certainly know about long playoff waits. The Vikings fans in the tailgate parties before the NFC championship game were eating crayfish and dancing along with the Saints fans — they weren’t threatened, they were having a great time.
Every 49ers fan, the team and it’s owners should be ashamed and embarrassed to wear the red and gold today. They won the game but are losers in every other way.
Don Moses, Mill Valley
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President Barack Obama will visit Walt Disney World during a planned trip to Orlando on Thursday, according to a White House aide. There, he will “unveil a strategy that will significantly help boost tourism and travel,” the aide added.
Details on that strategy were not disclosed. But it would be hard for Obama to pick a locale that’s better known than Disney for a tourism announcement. The resort giant in Orlando has four theme parks that collectively draw more than 45 million visitors a year.
It doesn’t appear, however, that he’ll get much love from local politicians. Aides to U.S.Sen. Bill Nelson said the Florida Democrat was unlikely to attend because the office “got word too late” of the visit and had meetings planned in other parts of the state. And Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer is scheduled to be in Washington that day for a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
While the details of the announcement are still unknown, there’s one topic at the top of the political wish list for Central Florida’s tourism industry: Visa reform. The tourism industry has been pushing Congress and Obama to make it easier for visitors from emerging nations such as Brazil, India and China to come to the U.S. as tourists.
In Brazil, where citizens have a reputation for loving Orlando’s theme parks, there are four consulate offices to conduct the required in-person interviews for people who want a visa to visit the U.S. That means families could have to travel several hundred miles before they are even approved to travel to the U.S.
But a recent Congressional appropriations bill gave the Secretary of State the authority to develop a pilot program to use videoconferencing to conduct remote visa interviews for leisure and business visitors. Such video conferencing would be high on Disney’s priority list, as it would likely cut the expense for international travelers who are interested in coming to see the Mouse.
Disney is bracing for heavy security around the Magic Kingdom. The giant resort recently reduced the Magic Kingdom’s hours for Thursday while extending hours and adding entertainment at its other three parks. The resort has also imposed parking restrictions around a nearby hotel, Disney’s Contemporary Resort.
Comments »(via NY POST)
Bourbon and Budweiser may be the national staples, but nobody outdoes America in wine drinking either, with the country uncorking 3.7 billion bottles in 2011.
That’s enough vino for the US to pass Italy and France, taking the first place among wine-consuming nations worldwide by volume.
Italy had to settle for second place, while France was third last year, all according to a new study by International Wine and Spirit Research. The Old World still leads in per capita consumption, however.
And America’s grape-swilling ways are expected to keep growing, with the study suggesting 10 percent growth by 2015.
Read more: http://trade.cc/zpv
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