Time Magazine | November 30, 2012
Who's to Blame for Hewlett-Packard's Multi-Billion Dollar Autonomy Debacle? - "The fallout from Hewlett-Packard's purchase of software company Autonomy, which has turned into a multi-billion dollar debacle, keeps getting worse. Last week, after a several-months-long investigation, H.P. announced an $8.8 billion write-down related to allegedly fraudulent accounting at Autonomy, which it purchased last year for more than $11 billion. H.P. said it had referred the matter to criminal and regulatory authorities in the U.S. and in Britain, where Autonomy was founded. The scandal has led to a bitter war of words between H.P. executives, including CEO Meg Whitman, and Autonomy founder Mike Lynch, who has demanded details of H.P.'s investigation. H.P. has responded by telling Lynch that it will see him in court.

"Earlier this week, H.P. was slapped with a shareholder lawsuit in federal court in San Jose, California, which named Whitman, H.P.'s board of directors, and auditing firms Deloitte and KPMG as defendants. The lawsuit alleges that H.P. and its accountants were negligent in missing red flags related to the Autonomy purchase. The lawsuit, which is likely the first of many related to the scandal, charges that H.P.'s failure to perform adequate due diligence caused the company to significantly overpay for Autonomy, resulting in billions of dollars of damages to the company and its shareholders."

Speaking as an H-P shareholder, I always thought that it was a really dumb idea to bring Ms. Whitman on board last year in the first place. I'm all for dumping her now, along with a good chunk of HP's Board of Directors for good measure. As it stands, her days at H-P are probably numbered.

Despite her late campaign's many claims about her tenure as eBay's CEO, it's long been my contention that founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar was the driving force behind that company's success, and that Ms. Whitman was merely at the right place at the right time and went along for the ride. And while she did her best to drive up eBay's stock price (and thus her own options), she did so by making a lot of its customers unhappy with the changes she wrought, and nobody lamented her departure when she cashed out.

In obvious retrospect, California voters were absolutely right to turn aside Meg Whitman's self-financed bid to become that state's governor two years ago, opting instead to give a well-seasoned Jerry Brown another opportunity to wear the big sombrero. To paraphrase Annie Lennox of the Eurhythmics, "Baby, you're just overblown!"

Saleton:
 

So when you brag about winning "every economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household income," that doesn't mean you won middle-income voters. It means you don't know what middle-income is. And it means you're dismissing 50 percent of Americans, which makes you 3 percentage points more out of touch than Romney and pretty much kills you in any election where lower-income people show up to vote.

The Iowa Supreme Court ruling said Allensworth has been given credit for the time he spent in jail in Polk County prior to going to the state prison. But the court said the law is clear that time spent in supervised probation should not be figured in with time spent behind bars to calculate the credits used for early release from prison.