Bohner, a former journalist and TV personality who was once briefly married to author Michael Lewis, took up with the married Schmidt last year while she was living and working in south Florida. Since then, Schmidt "paid her an ungodly amount of money" to relocate her business, Kate Bohner Productions, to Los Angeles; she set up shop on Pacific Avenue in Venice, Calif. He's been spending the occasional weekend with her, flying down from the Bay Area on Thursday and leaving Saturday, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. (Schmidt saw her twice in October and at least once in November.)

But besides paying for the move and buying Bohner a new set of diamond earrings on every trip, Schmidt, whose net worth has been estimated at $6 billion, hasn't been forthcoming with cash. He attended a meeting at Bohner's firm to get pitched on funding a new $1 million documentary show. It sounds like he didn't bite, because Bohner's said to be losing her job.

Will Schmidt set Bohner up with a job at Google, as he did with a previous girlfriend, PR exec Marcy Simon? Bohner has told people she's already been working for Google — for free. She's been writing executive summaries about Google's push into the cell-phone market, work she estimates she could have billed at $250,000.

So why is Schmidt being so cheap? It's possible he's nervous about bad publicity that could come from leaving a money trail. He's said to have an arrangement with his wife Wendy, but she may not appreciate having the name of Schmidt's girlfriend make the headlines. So why doesn't he buddy up with some other media mogul and get them to fund Bohner's company on the sly? Ah, there's the rub: Schmidt has been so aggressively unlikeable in his dealings with other media CEOs that he doesn't have any chits to cash in.

You have to admire how Schmidt bats the question aside: Google engineers have thought long and hard about this, and concluded that protecting users' privacy would make pages load too slowly. What he doesn't mention is that this is a problem because the slower pages load, the fewer Web searches we make; and the fewer Web searches we make, the fewer ads Google can sell. Google could make the Web safe for our secrets, in other words — its whiz kids know exactly how to do it — but it would just take too long. The king has spoken.

We haven't gotten anyone from Google or Yahoo to confirm this bit, but we're told cops interrupted a call Schmidt was making to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to discuss how to get a proposed advertising deal past government regulators. The deal was blocked. Schmidt, who endorsed Barack Obama late in the election cycle and got tapped to his board of economic advisors, could use his newfound political clout to get the pesky law overturned. The cell-phone rule, or the antitrust one — we're not sure which one is more bothersome to him. (Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

Google has plenty of business in Washington these days, from the Federal Communications Commission to the Department of Justice. Convenient, then, that CEO Eric Schmidt endorsed Obama weeks before the election, joining his board of economic advisors and appearing in Obama's primetime infomercial. Schmidt doesn't need a government job — he's clearly volunteering to be America's CTO in his spare time.

Schmidt is savvy enough to realize that YouTube's growing prominence as a media outlet could help the company become a larger political player — which is why the site sponsored two campaign debates. Traffic? Come on. YouTube hardly needs the help. Schmidt — who attended one debate with a mistress on his arm, like an old-school power broker — orchestrated the events to maximize Google's political influence.

The outgoing administration has not been friendly to Google, whose management team tilts strongly to the left. The Department of Justice's threat to sue Google if it proceeded with a deal to sell search ads for Yahoo may have been, at least in part, politically motivated.

Google mostly wants a free hand from Washington to cement its lead in online advertising — but it also wants help bullying telephone and cable companies into letting its services and ads flow unimpeded on high-speed broadband lines and cell phones, a cause it has dubbed "network neutrality."

Network neutrality is an abstract issue. But YouTube, helpfully, makes it very concrete to politicians, who have long understood the power of the moving image to influence the public. It's easy to picture Google lobbyists pulling up a politician's YouTube videos, and asking them, "Now how would you feel if Verizon slowed down your videos? Wouldn't it be wrong if AT&T didn't let customers view them on their cell phones?"

Even in its copyright enforcement, Google can club politicians. The McCain campaign complained about YouTube's takedown policy, which has a mandatory waiting period before videos whose rights are disputed can be reposted to the site. Will Democratic politicians — or any politician who votes the right way on network neutrality — find that a YouTube account manager is glad to make that kind of problem quietly go away?

It's a symbiotic relationship, to be sure. Google helps politicians reach young voters on YouTube and hosts their videos for free. YouTube benefits from the free content and the traffic political videos generate; even if it doesn't sell ads directly on the pages, it's estimated that it could make $1 billion a year on search ads — and in that business, merely cementing YouTube's traffic lead helps Google make money.

In that light, isn't there something that stinks about handing the president's weekly addresses to a single commercial outlet controlled by a political ally of the president? Obama's YouTube chats amount to a large, unspoken, behind-the-scenes government kickback. Every election has something dirty about it. And there's no question Google won this contest.

If so, it's scant reward for America's CTO. If transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett's two-minute talk yesterday is any indicator, most of these clips will be no more exciting than a White House press release. Obama himself, though, has one of the most awesome telepresences I've ever seen. Mr. President, get yourself a bulldog and a skateboard and you'll blow Avril Lavigne and Justin Laipply right off the Most Viewed (All Time) page.

Because, come on, why manage a bunch of government IT when you already run Google and park your jets next door at Nasa? The city of Washington, D.C. uses Google Docs. Schmidt doesn't need to become America's CTO, because he already is America's CTO. (Photo by Reuters/Carlos Barria)

In theory, smartphones will detect when a wireless mic is in use in the area, and not interfere with it. In practice, who are they kidding? New York City's Broadway League is campaigning to keep that part of the radio spectrum free for roughly 450 wireless microphones used in Manhattan's theater district. Out here, I'll be furious if Journey's next show at Shoreline is ruined when 853 Google employees check their mail during "Wheel in the Sky." (Photo by Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)

Right: Because it's an awesome branding opportunity. The draft is a self-parody of corner office drama, full of Honorary Co-Chairs, Leaders, and Former CEOs. But the real story is: Who's missing? Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are here, but not Larry Page. Twitter's Ev Williams is here, but not Digg's Kevin Rose. Federated Media: Present. TechCrunch: Absent. Mark Zuckerberg is not here, but Sheryl Sandberg pulled a John Hancock: She's right up top, where Owen can't miss her. Oh, look, she's trying to make nice! She's going to be sorry.

Last year, Google struck a $144 million deal to lease land from Nasa's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, for future office space. Separately, but not coincidentally, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, through a company called H211 LLC, struck a deal with Nasa to lease a hangar at Moffett Field for their growing fleet of private jets.

Why on earth, or in space, did the Googlers get parking privileges at Moffett? Nasa and Google came up with a great spin: The jets would be available to fly scientific missions. Larry and Sergey got to geek out, thinking their party plans served a higher purpose — while saving hours commuting to and from SJC or SFO.

One small hitch, Miguel Helft reports in Bits: Using the party planes for scientific missions required tinkering with their electronics. And changing anything about the planes required new FAA certifications.

This may explain why Larry and Sergey pulled their party plane from a recent Nasa mission. We know it wasn't out for repairs — around the same time, they used it to ferry guests to and from Gavin Newsom's wedding.

Hence the Dornier fighter jet, which is deemed an "experimental" plane, and which will now satisfy H211's space-mission duties. But that leaves the Googlers and Nasa in a rather unsatisfying position. When the Googlejets were flying for Nasa, they had a reasonable excuse for parking them at Moffett Field. But the purchase of a special plane to run space missions leaves Larry and Sergey's party-plane fleet used solely for civilian purposes. What are they doing at the field? Why, satisfying a quid pro quo, like they always were. This latest twist on Larry and Sergey's lease just makes it more obvious.

Googlers have slowly been realizing that their job isn't an entitlement. GOOG could lay off 10 percent of its work force and see no difference in revenue. I am guessing that the engineers aren't panicking at all, because engineers walk on water at the G. Who is freaking out? Contractors. If that contract doesn't get renewed, hit the bricks, pal.

See, contractors at Google are like Mexican immigrants in Southern California. They do the jobs that nobody else wants to do and are treated like a lower class of human. Maybe engineers are worried then that they will have to do some of the bullshit, why-did-i-get-a-PhD-for-this work that the contractors are doing

Schmidt is 53, no young voter will listen to anybody over 35.

Asked at a speech this month whether he would consider entering the political arena, the 53-year-old Mr. Schmidt shouted, "H-, no!" But some tech and media executives speculate that he might desire a role in an Obama administration, possibly the chief technology officer post Sen. Obama has said he would create.

(Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³)

There's more than a hint of desperation around YouTube's scramble. And that's as it should be. Google, in its early days, scrambled around for a business model; at one point, it thought it might do enterprise software, which is how it ended up with Schmidt, a former computer scientist, as a CEO.

Mistakes happen.

And that's the point: YouTube needs to make mistakes, lots of them, fast. Google's advertising business is, for now, gushing cash, giving YouTube some room to maneuver. But shareholders are not infinitely patient. The more ways YouTube tries to make money, the better the odds it will happen on something that works. It needs to carefully measure what's working, and tweak its efforts. This kind of mind-numbing lather-rinse-repeat gruntwork is actually something Google is good at; feed its engineers data, and they'll come up with an algorithm for success. What Google can't afford to do is waste time chasing some impossibly elegant solution which springs, full-grown, like Minerva from the skull of Google god-king Eric Schmidt.

• Steve Ballmer
• Mitchell Baker
• Jeff Bezos
• Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt
• Jeff Clavier
• Paul Graham
• Arianna Huffington
• Joi Ito
• Steve Jobs
• Jonathan Kaplan
• Loic Le Meur
• Jack Ma
• Matt Mullenweg
• Rupert Murdoch
• Craig Newmark
• Gabe Rivera
• Kevin Rose
• Sheryl Sandberg
• Jon Stewart
• Peter Thiel
• Maria Thomas
• Anssi Vanjoki
• Jimmy Wales
• Evan Williams
• Jerry Yang

Young Steve Jobs, Apple cofounder:

Jobs, older and thinner:

Young Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO:

Old Bill Gates, philanthropist:

Young Eric Schmidt, before he was Google's CEO:

Old Eric Schmidt:

Young Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO:

Old Larry Ellison:

Young Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen:

Not quite as young Ning cofounder Marc Andreessen:

Only one man has escaped the effects of time. That is, of course, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

Wait. Doesn't Yahoo delete an account if it doesn't get used for a certain period of time? So this means his account his still active? Google CEO uses Yahoo Mail. Boy, if I'm Yahoo's creative department; I've had a full-page banner ad just HANDED to me. No work needed! Ad should read: "I use the web's best email" — E. Schmidt, CEO, Google.

It's not clear how widespread the price hikes are. (If you've seen raises in your Google bids, please let us know.) But even if the price changes are narrowly targeted, they're alarming in their size and suddenness. The effect of hiking the bids, and then dropping them, says our tipster, is that many of the keyword campaigns were canceled for not meeting the temporarily raised minimums, as he says this screenshot shows:

Google will likely defend the move as an effort to improve the quality of ads, arguing that more expensive ads are more likely to prove of interest to Web searchers. But the net effect is to shut out mom-and-pop shops aiming to advertise in small niches — the market on which Google built its advertising machine.

At Google's Zeitgeist conference today, sales chief Tim Armstrong said, "We have one of the most transparent, accountable models in the digital landscape," True in the sense that Google's pay-per-click advertising can easily be tracked to see its benefit. But when the cost is set by Google, in an utterly opaque manner, how can anyone make rational plans around its advertising? All the cost-benefit analyses in the world won't help an advertiser whom Google decides to disadvantage, for its own obscure reasons.

AdWords, the system Google uses to take bids for ads and place them, has long been called a "black box"; its operations are mysterious, and Google does not explain the changes it makes to its algorithms — in part, it says, because it changes them so frequently. But regulators would be wise to demand more clarity for Google. It's a simple quid pro quo: If Google is to expand its reach with the Yahoo deal, why not give customers a bit more clarity on how it charges them? It doesn't seem like much to ask.

(Photo by Steve Jurvetson)

With Google already facing suit from Viacom and potentially the Justice Department over its deal to serve ads against Yahoo search, the company probably decided it didn't need another legal headache, especially not one that would antagonize the 41 percent of Americans who call themselves pro-life. Defending the company's deal with Yahoo yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: "You face a question as a large company trying to change things: How many initiatives do you want to take on that are unpopular or lead to criticism?"

GE owns vast rights of way for the electrical grid, which could potentially aid Google's efforts to build their own Internet backbone infrastructure — even over the transmission lines themselves. And of course, less demand for electricity combined with stable supply means cheaper juice for Google's giant datacenters. The real question is, what's in this for Immelt and GE? (Photos by AP/Phelan M. Ebenhack, Mark Lennihan)

We are in the process of talking to the government. They've not indicated one way or the other how they're dealing with us. We always worry a little bit, but we think our arguments are pretty strong. Yahoo has made it very, very clear they're going to take the best parts of their network and ours and combine them.'

(Photo by World Economic Forum)

The poster claims Dickman then arranged to get a kickback from Bon Appétit. Google, he goes on to write, investigated Dickman and Bon Appétit, going as far as testing fruits and vegetables, presumably to see if they met Google's high standards for organic and sustainable ingredients. The implication there: Bon Appétit had been feeding Googlers slop dressed up as fancy fare. The end of the Craigslist poster's story: Dickman was brought before Google's board and fired. All juicy gossip — but there's one thing that doesn't make sense about this whole tale.

Dickman is now working at Apple, a company with close ties to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors. Apple directors Bill Campbell and Al Gore are important advisors to Schmidt. If Dickman left Google in a cloud, how could he possibly land a job at Apple? Either the poster's allegations aren't true — or something darker is going on here. One possible explanation: Google's leaders might have arranged for Dickman to get a job with their friends at Apple in exchange for buying his silence on other matters.

Here are excerpts from the original post on Craigslist:

Disclaimer: I don't work at Google. I probably never will. I'm not smart enough. As far as I can tell, almost nobody is. So it goes.

From a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, comes the following strange story ...

It seems that once upon a time, there was a guy - we'll call him Dick.

'Dick' was director of food services for a really big dot-com.

'Dick' had a wife. She was a highly placed executive at Bon Appetit....

It's not clear exactly HOW Bon Appetit came to acquire the Go^H^H big dot-com's contract. Right there, some thorny questions can be asked ... like, whether inside information influenced Bon Appetit's bid? ...

It seems that 'Dick' negotiated, it is alleged, two deals - the second deal translated into a end-of-the-year 'rebate' check being cut by B. A. and delivered to, yes, you guessed it, 'Dick'.

To make matters worse B. A., it has been said, did not deliver what they contracted to deliver, to big dot-com's cafeteria(s). Apparently there was a little watering down of quality, a little substitution here and there going on.

Big dot-com, it is said, did an audit. What sort of audit? It seems likely that there were private investigators involved ... I'd surmise a few bugs, here and there ... and maybe some chemical and DNA profiling of fruits and vegetables.

(If 'Dick' was like every other 'dick' I've ever known, he lined up every week to have his car detailed by the inhouse auto detailing service - so installing a bug in his car, as well as retrieving the audio, would have been child's play. Note to would-be 'dicks' ... don't be a dick.)

'Dick' was invited to a meeting of the BoD, I hear, and given two choices - resign, or be terminated. He's outta there, now....