More layoffs are coming to Google, employees there believe. A Googler tells us top executives abruptly cancelled meetings across the Googleplex Friday.

Marcy Simon, the former mistress of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has landed a PR gig at Mark Penn's Burson-Marsteller. We hear her new job is stirring up antitrust trouble for Google at Microsoft's behest.

How does Eric Schmidt do it? The computer nerd runs Google, has Obama's ear, parks his jet fleet in a NASA hangar, and has a rocking girlfriend. Is she the reason he flies so much?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the BBC that the U.S. should break up banks that get "too big to fail." What about Google? Is it too big — and should the government take action?

The accountants have taken over the Googleplex, once a hotbed of amiably unprofitable innovation. The notion that ads would pay the way for everything has been dropped — and "fee" is replacing "free."

The nation is in crisis, our economy on the brink. And yet President Change is spending time with a group of technowastrels whose sole noteworthy accomplishment has been to spend other people's money.

Eric Schmidt is an old dude who just doesn't get Twitter. That groupthink consensus emerged after the Google CEO dismissed the fast-growing messaging service at a conference. But he missed the real critique Twitter deserves.

Google's perfectionist cupcake princess is totally misunderstood! That's the claim Marissa Mayer, the VP who oversees Google search, makes to a credulous New York Times, which licks up the frosted version of her career.

Everyone wants a sugar daddy to save them. Wall Street has found one in Washington. But the newspaper industry has been batting its eyes in the direction of Mountain View, Calif., home of Google. Ha!

It's Google's presidency. We're just watching it. Six Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounder Larry Page, have donated $25,000 apiece to fund President Barack Obama's swearing-in party.

It may be time to put a cork in Silicon Valley's most famous law firm. Wilson Sonsini is no longer celebrating its new attorneys with champagne. That trimmed perk is just the beginning of its woes.

What's the use of dating a megabillionaire if he can't throw some bucks your way? Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who's been seeing video producer Kate Bohner since last fall, hasn't come through with funding for her documentary production firm, so she's out of a job.

Two weeks after Valleywag stopped believing that President-for-Change Obama might steal Eric Schmidt from Google, Silicon Alley Insider editor Henry Blodget has weighed in with the same speculation. His bullet list of reasons Schmidt might quit isn't crazy, but here's the six-word version of Blodget's post: "We have no inside knowledge here. " I have enough inside knowledge to say this: true Googlers don't see Google as a stepping-stone to a government job. Government is part of the problem. Google is the solution. (Photo by Reuters/Carlos Barria)

Is Google becoming the king of the Web? Well, duh — that happened about five years ago, before anyone really noticed. But activist groups, now and again, worry about whether Google knows too much about us. Yesterday, Consumer Watchdog's John Simpson quizzes Google CEO Eric Schmidt about whether his company is doing enough to guard our privacy.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.

No man is above the law — not even multibillionaire Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At least that's what we hear from a well-placed tipster, who says Schmidt recently confessed to having been pulled over by the cops last month in Los Angeles for talking on his cell phone while driving. (California law recently changed to require the use of a headset.) Oh, but it gets worse for Schmidt.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 CEO Eric Schmidt, left, sits at a campaign event for Barack Obama in October. YouTube's growing role in politics makes Schmidt an unelected Washington player. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. the best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: jasonnellis, for "That's not a sweater, honey." (Photo by cjwoolridge)

Is YouTube making Google a political player? The video-sharing site, with its stratospheric bandwidth bills and questionable new ad formats, may never pay Larry and Sergey back in cash for the $1.65 billion they shelled out to buy it in 2006. But it doesn't have to. YouTube, having conquered online video, is taking over political broadcasting. The conventional unwisdom in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., is that this election made YouTube. Pah! It's true that campaign videos spread faster than ever thanks to YouTube. But they made up a tiny fraction of clips and traffic on the site. Politicians owe YouTube a debt that Google is just starting to collect on — and hosting President Obama's 21st century fireside chats is just a down payment.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.

This week's Democratic Party weekly address by our audaciously hopeful President-elect will not be on boring old NPR. Barack Obama's going to upload to YouTube, reports the Washington Post. The WaPo says the Obama administration will also make "online Q&As and video interviews" part of its communications strategy. Think this is payback for Google CEO Eric Schmidt's late-to-the-game Obama endorsement?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.

"I love working at Google and I'm very happy to stay at Google, so the answer is no," Google baldfaced-liar-in-chief Eric Schmidt told Jim Cramer on CNBC Friday, when asked if he'd take a job with the incoming administration. "Google is its own exciting opportunity." I know what you're thinking: Obama turned him down already, how cold is that? More likely, Schmidt truly doesn't want the job. He just wanted Obama to ask.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)

At yesterday's Web 2.0 Summit, Kleiner Perkins whiz John Doerr — a man so successful he can get away with wearing the same three ties for ten years — told attendees that Barack Obama should skip over Googlers Eric Schmidt and Vint Cerf, and instead hire Kleiner Perkins partner and Sun co-founder Bill Joy as his national chief technology officer. Obama's job description was focused more on counter-terrorism intelligence and IT supremacy. Doerr thinks that's misguided: “The most important thing he's got to do is kick-start a huge amount of research and innovation in energy." Energy tech is Doerr's current focus at Kleiner, of course. But it's unclear to me whether Joy is now a leader or a dilettante on the topic. Doerr also suggested the U.S. "staple a green card to the diploma" to keep foreign-born engineering students from going back home after graduation. Throw in a fixed-rate mortgage for gossip bloggers, and I'll endorse the whole package.