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Hillary Clinton says she may quibble with being depicted as Big Brother -- and IBM, for that matter -- but that it's a good thing as long as it gets people interested in politics.

From an interview with NY1 about that pro-Barack Obama video that has spread like a super-virus around the internet:.

Q: What do you think of the video?

"I haven't seen it but I'm pleased that it seems to be taking attention away from what used to be on YouTube and getting a lot of hits, namely me singing "The Star Spangled Banner." Everybody in the world now knows I can't carry a tune. I thank heavens for small favors and the attention has shifted and now maybe people won't have to tune in and hear me screeching about "The Star Spangled Banner."

Q: Should the video be removed?

"You know, that's for somebody else to decide. I don't have an opinion one way of another. I think anything that drives interest in these campaigns and gets people who otherwise are not at all interested in politics, I think that's pretty good. I might quibble a little bit about the content but if we get more people, especially young people, thinking about politics, I'm happy about that."

-- Jason Horowitz

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This afternoon, quite a big listing popped up on the Brown Harris Stevens website.

But just how big is the Harkness House, aka the Harkness Mansion? "It's the widest house you can buy in New York," said BHS managing director Paula Del Nunzio, who has the exclusive listing. And it will cost you $55 million.

When the Trowbridge, Colt and Livingston-designed townhouse first went on the market in October 2005, the listing belonged to Prudential Douglas Elliman executive vice president Ann Cutbill Lenane. Ms. Lenane, who is traveling, could not be reached.

"When you have a wonderful shell, you can do so many things," film producer Jean Doumanian told The Observer earlier this year. "There are very few things you can't do in that house." Ms. Doumanian and her boyfriend, banker Jaqui Safra, own the mansion.

Ms. Del Nunzio, who would not comment on why the sellers switched brokers, pointed out that the 1896 Neo-French Renaissance mansion went off the market in December. Afterwards, it became the Kips Bay Designer Showhouse for 2006

"Now it's on full force," said Ms. Del Nunzio.

If you happen to buy the mansion, you'll live in the former digs of shipping magnate Nathaniel McCready, IBM-founder Thomas J. Watson, and Standard Oil-heriess Rebekah Harkness (who bought the place for her famous Ballet Arts school.)

So what's the big point? "The point now is $40 million was a record, but then that didn't last because $45 came along. Can $55 beat it? Can this one sell for more than $45?".  read more »

- Max Abelson

The introduction of Playboy Magazine in Indonesia demonstrates an important point about the Islamic world. You'll see that the article notes that the magazine is fifty years behind the American edition in terms of what it shows—not even nipples.

The key word here is fifty. The Islamic world is clearly behind us in certain respects, the role of women and free speech most of all. But by and large these societies are third world countries, with third world economies; they're traditional cultures. There is something highly appealing about traditional cultures, but their attitudes on free speech and women's freedoms are just backward. We used to be a traditional culture before World War II shook the daylights out of us and IBM and Hugh Hefner and Betty Friedan got to work. The point is that Islam's attitudes on these questions are actually similar to our patriarchal attitudes 50 to 100 years ago. And they are likely now to change as ours did, and at a faster pace, given the internet...

Islam scares us. The fear was best expressed a couple months back on the News Hour on PBS by the redoubtable David Brooks, when he said that the Mohammed cartoons furor showed that Islam is still in the 12th century. Brooks is simply wrong (and reflecting Crusader-era paradigms). It's not eight centuries off, it's less than one. Sometimes the Other is not that other after all.

The Plot to Get Bill Gates: An Irreverent Investigation of the World's Richest Man … and the Peopl  read more »