I sat down Tuesday afternoon in Mountain View, Calif., with Dan Nye, the newish CEO (he joined earlier this year) of LinkedIn. That’s the company that is like Facebook for grownups, a businessperson’s social networking site. Nye’s looking for press because LinkedIn plans to unveil some nifty new features on Dec. 10. (I got a look, but agreed not to divulge anything yet.) I was interested in hearing what he had to say, in part because of the rumors flying around that LinkedIn plans to sell the company early next year to News Corp. (NWS)

The buyout gossip began with an item last week in the UK version of TechCrunch. Never mind that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (a made man in the PayPal mafia and a buddy of mine) categorically denied the rumor in the Daily Telegraph. Anything that suggests that Rupert Murdoch would expand his social-networking empire is sure to set tongues wagging. Breakingviews.com wrote an intelligent summary of why a LinkedIn acquisition would make sense, largely because of the opportunities to leverage LinkedIn’s tools with the Wall Street Journal readership.

Not surprisingly, Nye didn’t deny that News Corp. made an offer for his company. Instead, he said that when he joined the company he told the board — comprised of Hoffman, Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme and Greylock’s David Sze — that he was only interested in taking the job if the goal was to “go long.” But is he selling out anyway? “We’re excited about building this company,” said Nye. “It would take a helluva lot to get us off that path.” Does that mean $1 billion? “A lot more than that,” said Nye, who worked at Procter & Gamble (PG), Intuit (INTU) and Advent Software (ADVS) before joining LinkedIn.

LinkedIn clearly is playing to win. The company has mushroomed from 60 employees when Nye joined in February to almost 200 today. At the time, LinkedIn had 9 million members; today it has nearly 17 million. Nye predicted revenues will range from $75 million to $100 million next year.

LinkedIn has the virtue of having survived adversity. Before Facebook and MySpace existed — back when Friendster was hot — LinkedIn was just getting going. It’s still going. Independent or part of News Corp., it’s fun watching this plucky company succeed.

In a contentious debate the fun begins when one side or the other starts slinging mud to confuse people. It has started in the battle over taxation of “carried interest,” otherwise cast as whether partners in investment partnerships ought to be paying a higher tax rate. (In an earlier post, Tax the Rich, I provide links to a handful of other articles that review the “Blackstone (BX) tax” fairly thoroughly.)

The obfuscation began this week in response to a bill filed last week in the House by Rep. Sander Levin that would remove the capital-gains treatment for carried interest, which is the portion of profits that private-equity partnerships take when they distribute winnings to their investors. Opponents of this proposal cleverly, but disingenuously, are trying to frame the debate as Congress trying to raise the rates on ALL capital gains. The Wall Street Journal has a good round-up today, and here are the money quotes, deep in the article:

In the House, bill opponents are being marshaled by Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.), a member of Mr. Rangel’s tax-writing committee and a big recipient of campaign support from the financial-services industry. He hopes to portray the legislation as the first step by Democrats toward repealing the 15% rates on capital gains and dividends.

“I don’t think people realize how much this has become a proxy fight for the 15% capital-gains rate itself,” said David Hirschmann, the president of the capital-markets division of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. Cantor, who is the top vote-counter for Republicans in the House, could win votes from most Republican lawmakers if he successfully defines the issue as a fight over the capital-gains rate, which the Republican-controlled Congress approved and Mr. Bush signed into law in 2003.

See, the interesting thing here is that neither Levin nor anyone else who is looking at this issue has said anything about changing the capital gains rate. They’re only looking at changing how carried interest is taxed.

Economist and TV personality Larry Kudlow posted a similarly dishonest article at the National Review Online in which he said that raising the tax rate on “risk capital” is just the first step toward eliminating the preferential treatment for capital gains altogether.

In his efforts at confusing people, Kudlow at least has put his finger on the issue with the expression he has fabricated, risk capital. Private equity shops, which include venture capital firms, argue that the profits their partners make years after they make an investment should be considered a capital gain because they’ve taken a risk. In fact, the risk is in reputation and time only, not capital. (If they do invest capital, nobody is arguing that shouldn’t be subject to capital-gains treatment.) At issue is how to tax the money they make if their investments — with other people’s money — pan out. The obvious answer: the same tax rate other rich people pay when they make money, 35%.

In an editorial this week, the New York Times summed up the reasoning for this change:

With income inequality surging along with the need for tax revenue, the bills’ supporters rightly conclude that it is untenable for the most highly paid Americans to enjoy tax rates that are lower than those of all but the lowest-income workers.

Confusing sloganeering aside, the issue is really that simple.

Mike Volpi has been on the job as CEO of Joost, the new online video network, for a few weeks. But already he’s got his mission statement down better than Terry Semel ever did at Yahoo (YHOO). (See this interview I did last summer with Semel to get a sense of what I mean.) “We want to transform the way people entertain themselves,” Volpi said last night at a party at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in North Hollywood, Calif. (A fairly serious guy, Volpi also began his remarks with a pitch-perfect zinger: “My staff has told me this will be my only opportunity ever to say, ‘I’d like to thank the Academy …’”)

If you know anything at all about Joost, you know it doesn’t suffer from ambition. Founded by the two guys who started Kazaa and Skype, Joost is one of scores of companies that are trying to be the next YouTube. And yet it’s gotten a higher profile than the others, even before officially starting its service. That’s due in part to its founders and partly to early investors like Skype funder Index Ventures (hey Danny!), CBS (CBS), Google (GOOG) and YouTube investor Sequoia Capital. Nabbing Volpi added yet more cred to Joost. He was a Cisco (CSCO) bigshot for years. (Read David Kirkpatrick’s overview of Joost on the day Volpi’s hiring was announced.)

Okay, so how is Joost doing? Well, it’s hard to say. The company is still in its testing phase. Volpi told me 700,000 users have downloaded the company’s player, a piece of software to watch videos on your computer. It has signed all sorts of deals with creative types — which is why it threw a party in La-La Land. And it’s working with Interpublic Group’s (IPG) Emerging Media Lab to let IPG’s advertising clients test how Joost slices and dices both programming and user data. In short, well-funded Joost basically isn’t going for the hard sell yet, either with advertisers (whom it’s charging only nominally) or with users, while it’s trying to see if they actually like the experience Joost is pushing.

Watching Joost must be what it was like when the cable networks got going: a new video experience with a splotchy menu of shows that only a few people were experiencing. Will it break out of the pack? Way too early to tell. At least Joost seems to know where it wants to go.

I don’t often gush about products. I’m just not a gadget guy. I liken my knowledge of computer-related toys to my fluency in Japanese a decade ago: Pretty darn good compared to someone who speaks no Japanese; pretty weak compared to someone who does.

Anyway, I’ve just started using a product that is gushworthy. It’s called the Flip camcorder, and it’s made by a San Francisco technology company called Pure Digital Technologies. What’s so great about the Flip is that 1) it’s cheap; 2) the quality is darn good; and 3) it is brain-dead easy to connect to YouTube. In other words, for $120 or $150, you can get a really basic camcorder and then quickly post videos on the Web, as my fellow CNNMoney blog MediaBiz did recently. Trust me, it’s an instant grandparent pleaser. This product isn’t for the ultra-techy crowd. It’s for people like me, who haven’t gotten around to buying an expensive camcorder (I will) and spending hours editing videos.

As for the business, this is Pure Digital’s second product line, the first being a single-use (i.e., disposable, though the company works hard to recycle them) digital camera. The company is funded by Sequoia, Benchmark, Morgan Stanley (MS) (hey Mary … missed you at D!) and others. It’s already selling Flips at retailers like Best Buy (BBY), Target (TGT) and Costco (COST) and promises to add a bunch more. What Pure Digital has gotten right is incorporating seemless software into a small device that you’re happy to toss into your bag and forget about when you’re not using. It’s really similar, in fact, to how Apple (AAPL) built the iPod around its iTunes software. And it’s got me thinking, why in the world doesn’t Sony do this? And if it won’t, why wouldn’t Sony (SNE) buy Pure Digital?

By the way, to see the Flip in action, watch this short video of Pure Digital CEO Jonathan Kaplan talking about his own company:

I’ve read about GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s flip-flops on important social issues like gay marriage and gun control. But it was more than a little amusing to see the businessman’s candidate squirming under questioning on a subject in which he is deeply knowledgeable: private equity.

In a front-page article Monday in The New York Times, Romney owns up to the fact that somtimes buyout firms need to fire people at the companies they buy. But listen to his backtracking:

“The experience of the last eight years, running the Olympics and being a governor, would make me take an even more sensitive look at the impact of business decisions on the lives of suppliers and employees and others who are involved,” he said.

Sure, Mitt. Or this, when asked about the practice of private-equity firms taking dividends out of acquired companies long before they are successful investments, and putting the companies more deeply in debt in the process:

“It is one thing that if I had a chance to go back I would be more sensitive to,” Mr. Romney said. “It is always a balance. Great care has got to be taken not to take a dividend or a distribution from a company that puts that company at risk.” He added that taking a big payment from a company that later failed “would make me sick, sick at heart.”

This is why buyout firms do best, of course: make money for themselves and their investors. That’s a story line that admittedly wouldn’t play well on the hustings.

Another fun nugget in the piece is the writer’s assertion that Romney likes to refer to Bain Capital, which he founded, as a “venture-capital” firm. (The journalist I like to call their David Kirkpatrick wrote the article; Here’s ours.) Bain Capital did start out doing VC investments, but it quickly became a buyout shop, which, like most others, stayed away from hostile deals. Romney understands the distinction and how it might play with voters. VCs build businesses; buyout guys strip assets and fire people. (It’s a point the VC crowd is making, as I wrote here, in trying to distance itself from a potential tax-code revision aimed at buyout firms.)

Incidentally, the article - essentially a political piece in the front section of the nation’s newspaper of record - raises the taxation issue by pointing out that dealmakers like Romney typically pay taxes at a lower rate on the majority of their income than most Americans. (A recent Go West post covers this topic in more depth.) Curiously, the article doesn’t say if Romney would support a move to raise taxes on VCs and the PE crowd. One thing seems likely: Whatever answer Romney gives might well be different than the one he would have given 10 years ago.

Last week staffers on Congressional tax-writing committees held a closed-door meeting with various tax experts (lawyers and academics, primarily) to discuss changing the way private equity firms are taxed. To boil down a complicated topic, partners in private-equity firms - which include buyout funds and venture capital firms - typically pay ordinary income tax only on their management fees, usually 2% of assets under management. Their “carry,” or their share of any profits they generate for their investors, are taxed as long-term capital gains. (That’s a 35% tax rate for rich people earning ordinary income versus 15% for all long-term capital gains.)

It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense since the buyout and VC partners aren’t investing any money, just their time and effort — which is kind of what I invest when I go to work every day. (If they do invest actual money, that’s a different story, of course.) Henry Blodget has a good take on the topic in his blog, the Internet Outsider, and a New York Times editorial in April urged Congress to tackle this issue, arguing that capital gains receive “excessive” preference in the current tax code. I also have an article in the current issue of Fortune that discusses how VCs are trying to distance themselves from their buyout brethren, even though their partnerships are structured exactly the same way.

Anyway, at this closed-to-the-public meeting, the staffers (no lawmakers attended) took a mostly fact-finding approach, suggesting they haven’t decided what if any proposals they’ll put forward to change how firms are taxed. They also showed an interest in broader issues, like offshore tax shelters, a key device used by hedge funds. They heard from tax gurus including Jack Levin of Kirkland & Ellis, Dana Trier of Davis Polk, Victor Fleischer of the University of Colorado, Arturo Requenez of McDermott Will & Emery and Stuart Leblang of Akin Gump.

When I’ve discussed this issue with VCs and buyout types, the only question they keep asking is, Do you think anything will come of this? The answer seems to be that Congress will take its sweet time with this issue, usually a prescription for inaction.

(Should “carry” be taxed as ordinary income? Have your say in my comment section or in this poll.)

Some good stats out today from at outifit named Lux Research on the bubble aborning in green-tech investing. (Bubbles aren’t necessarily a bad thing, by the way, as a new book by my pal Daniel Gross argues.) Lux counts 930 energy startups in the world today, and firm president Matthew Nordan says “there’s no way that more than a fraction … can possibly succeed.” I made similar bubbleicious observations recently in a Fortune column.

Some other nuggets:

* There were $2.04 billion in green venture capital investments in 2006, about half again as much as the total invested since 1995.

* Just a few investments from VCs (think: Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, VantagePoint, etc.) account for a disproportionate share of the investments: the top 10% of investments have soaked up 39% of the cumulative VC capital deployed.

* “Major print media” mentioned green investing 3,485 times in 2006, representing 70% increases for each of the last two years.

If you read carefully, you’re starting to see a bit of a backlash on all things green, and not necessarily only from the Al Gore-hating rightwing media. Kurt Andersen penned a savvy piece in New York recently called So We’re Green. Now What? Yesterday’s New York Times also ran a thoughtful article in the Week in Review section on the limitations of carbon offsets. It also used the wish-washy headline-writing technique (see above) of asking a question: Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but is it Green? Brandweek reports that Honda (HMC), a clever marketer, is pulling back on its Environmentology advertising campaign.

The point here isn’t that environmentalism is a crock. Just that merely driving a Prius or planting a tree doesn’t all by itself help the environment that much. Neither does owning shares of First Solar (FSLR), because it is one of the few green-tech success stories so far, or General Electric (GE), because it’s investing heavily in wind power. (Some interesting tidbits on First Solar, by the way, in this article by the one and only Carol Loomis.) And with every bubble comes a backlash. Watch for it.