Things are getting ugly between the members of HP’s board who want to merge with Compaq, and Walter Hewlett, who doesn’t. They sent a letter to HP shareholders personally attacking Hewlett in hopes of discrediting his arguments against the merger using good old argumentum ad hominem. Were I an HP shareholder, I’d be more interested in the business case in favor of the merger and less interested in intramural battles among the board.

The massive conflict of interest problems that plague public accounting are of course big news now that Arthur Andersen’s accounting gymnastics on Enron’s behalf have been exposed, but there were plenty of people who were concerned about them back when everybody thought Enron was real. One of them is Arthur Levitte, the former head of the SEC. How was he rewarded? Let’s see:

Executives from the auditing firms said the proposals were unduly burdensome and unnecessary. But speaking of the episode this week, Mr. Levitt said the calls reflected the political influence of the industry, which ultimately succeeded in weakening his proposals to reduce the potential conflicts of interests at accounting firms.

“I have never been subjected to a more intensive and venal lobbying campaign,” said Mr. Levitt, who led the S.E.C. for almost eight years, the longest-serving chairman in the commission’s 67-year history. “I spent nearly all of my time during those months responding to senatorial and congressional queries and visits. It was totally time consuming.”

The accounting guys are undeterred by the Enron debacle, they’re making sure that their industry doesn’t have to suffer any consequences for it whatsoever by spending big bucks on keeping legislators in their pockets. President Bush is on their side, too, he said last month that he is naming two partners from public accounting firms to the board of the SEC.

AOL in Negotiations to Buy Red Hat … the headline says it all.

So everyone knows that I link to Paul Krugman’s economics columns in the New York Times pretty often. In the last half hour or so, I’ve lost all the respect I had for him. Krugman failed to disclose a massive conflict of interest in that he accepted a position on some sort of advisory board with Enron (and was paid $50,000 for it), but never mentioned it. For me, though, that’s not his greatest sin. His greatest sin is praising Enron back in 1999 for the same things that he condemns them for now and not explaining his change of heart.

I can see why an economist would be enthralled with Enron before its collapse. They were doing innovative things, economically speaking, and just as geeks fall for the siren song of Extreme Programming or the GPL, economists probably fall for the latest bizarre business models. What I don’t understand is why Krugman isn’t honest enough to explain the evolution in his thinking. It’s not uncommon for columnists to glom onto whatever the hot trend is and pretend like that’s where they were all along, but behaving that way doesn’t earn you any points with me.

By the way, Andrew Sullivan broke this story, but he gets no link because I loathe his writing.

Examining User Expectations for the Location of Common E-Commerce Web Objects observed 302 people to figure out where people expect to find things like the shopping cart button, login button, and merchandise on online stores.

My next CD-related product is going to come from Philips. They’re defying the movement among record companies toward “copy protected” audio CDs not only by refusing to allow those CDs to bear the official CD trademark, but also by saying that their CD burners will be able to both read and burn those copy protected discs.

Slate’s whopper of the week is President Bush’s claim that Ken Lay was an Ann Richards supporter in 1994, when Bush first ran for the governorship of Texas. Truly an obvious lie. The Slate piece doesn’t even mention that Lay donated to Bush’s 1978 campaign for a house seat.

Salon has not one, but two good pieces on Enron today. The first is Scott Rosenberg in full rant mode (sadly, Premium only), arguing that the Enron rise and fall is obviously a political scandal. Here are a couple of choice paragraphs:

The Enron affair seems to have earned its “get out of jail free” card from the pundits because, so far, it seems that no one in the Bush administration was stupid enough to try to help the corporation last autumn as its fortunes circled the drain. And since Enron’s campaign-donation tentacles and friends-in-high-places influence appears to have extended to both parties — lopsided a good ways toward the Republicans but also boasting some serious Democratic names (including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and New York Sen. Charles Schumer) — the Enron saga does not perfectly fit the capital’s partisan templates.
…
It may be that Enron and its officers did nothing in technical violation of the law. If so, the scandal lies precisely there: that what they did was legal when it plainly should have been outlawed; that they managed to buy the laws they needed to build the financial house of cards that earned them millions before crashing down on stockholders’ heads.

Salon also has a little scoop of their own. They’ve discovered that an Enron corporate attorney named Jordan Mintz took the radical step of hiring outside counsel himself to evaluate the legality of Enron’s partnership schemes. The firm recommended that Enron stop setting up the partnerships, and Mintz reported that to Enron execs, who ignored him, of course.

Even more shockingly, Enron’s CEO ignored the company’s treasurer when he expressed reservations about Enron’s partnership schemes. Apparently Enron treasurer Jeff McMahon told the CEO at the time, Jeff Skilling, that he could not continue to serve as treasurer unless Enron cleaned up its act with regard to the partnerships. Skilling responded him by “promoting” him to CEO of some random Enron subsidiary.

Thank you, Jack Valenti, for showing us all that we can feel free to casually throw around the word “terrorism” again. In an article about the sharing of video files online, Valenti explains: “We’re fighting our own terrorist war.” One thing can be certain, his terrorist war will be sure to include as much draconian legislation as he can pay his lawyers to write. (Link submitted by Rogers Cadenhead.)

Sorry to keep linking to Enron stories from the NYT, but this one is too good to pass up. Enron successfully managed to avoid paying any income tax four out of the last five years. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to pay a big chunk of taxes every year for the past five years. If you read the article, you’ll learn that the techniques Enron used to dodge their taxes (and even obtain massive refunds) are very common. It’s really important that we shove through the Bush “economic stimulus” package so that corporations too stupid or incompetent to figure out how to just evade corporate income taxes can also get a spot at the trough.