Out in California, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is running for Senate as a Republican against terrible liberal Barbara Boxer. And her former company is, for some reason, donating a lot of money to Boxer.

Carly Fiorina is already elevating the political discourse in California: The former Hewlett Packard CEO is emailing ads about that one time her opponent politely asked a general to call her "senator" instead of "m'aam," like an arrogant bitch.

It's fitting that Carly Fiorinia just announced her senate candidacy with the word "Admittedly." The former HP CEO hated voting, and promises to be more engaged in politics now. Too bad she's still proving her apathy.

Chris Anderson has plenty of distractions from editing Wired, including a lucrative sideline on the global lecture circuit and a tour to promote his new book. Anderson's prior commitments even removed him from the office on Wired's layoff day. (Updated)

Carly Fiorina became CEO of Hewlett Packard on the strength of her reputation as a sales dynamo. In politics, though, she's been a terrible saleswoman. And this "Carlyfornia" website for her senate campaign is somehow Fiorina's worst embarrassment yet.

It is notoriously difficult for business executives to jump into politics. California Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina's Iranian connection provides a textbook illustration of why.

• The value of Michael Jackson's estate may double by the end of the year thanks to the surge in music sales and all those movie/merch deals. [LAT]
• Bad news for Conan: Repeats of David Letterman's show last week still managed to beat new episodes of the Tonight Show in the ratings. [NYT]
• For the first time, Us Weekly's website attracted more monthly visitors than People.com. Us's footage of Michael Jackson's hair on fire helped. [WWD]
• Bill Bratton, the former police commissioner of LA and, before that, New York City, has landed a book deal with Random House's Broadway Books. [AP]
• Does lots of buzz on Twitter send people to movie theaters and boost box office sales? Not so much, at least according to one poll. [NYT]
• Dr. Dre, Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine, and Hewlett-Packard are teaming up to "save digital music." Good luck with that, guys. [CNET]

California is a hotbed for wacky, inexperienced politicians, like current Gov. Arnold Schwazenegger and his would-be replacement, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. Luckily, these people can all learn how not to launch a campaign, by watching Carly Fiorina.

Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard CEO, is thinking of running for a California senate seat. The Republican party is all for it. So it's too bad she hates voting — even worse than other Silicon Valley CEOs.

Carly Fiorina, still draped in the silky folds of the $45 million golden parachute with which she left Hewlett-Packard in 2005, is planning a Senate run. No wonder she's been talking about "executive excess" lately.

Rather than put more people on the street, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd is cutting salaries by 5 percent or more across the board. It's a paycheck experiment never before tried at a company this large.

HPQ shares jumped more than they have any day since 2002, after CEO Mark Hurd announced a fourth quarter profit of $1.03 per share, three cents above Bloomberg's compiled estimate. H-P nonetheless will extend its holiday vacation for employees from one week to two to cut costs. The best analyst quote is the simplest: "Despite worries about an economic slowdown, the company can still grow earnings." So what's your excuse?

HP thought it would be nifty to use Joan Jett's "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)" in ads for its new touch-screen computers. And it was pretty nifty! The song is catchy and fun, and works very well in the context of the ad (which is after the jump). Only one problem: It was written by glam-rock singer Gary Glitter, who was convicted of child molestation in Vietnam and child porn possession in the U.K. This is terrible for HP on so many levels, starting with the fact that it enriched a child predator.

At yesterday's Oracle OpenWorld conference, CEO Larry Ellison donned his best tan and announced a new partnership with Hewlett Packard to sell a hardware and software to speed up databases. A rack of eight devices will include 168 terrabytes of storage and a total of 64 processing cores on 16 Intel microprocessors and will be optimized for Oracle's database software. The idea, as haltingly explained by Ellison in the video above, is to clear the bottleneck between storage servers that hold the data and the database servers that process the requests. We've condensed the speech down to around a minute, but left in the awkward bits so you can wince along with the audience.Ellison goes through this like a Ron Popeil pitch but with less enthusiasm and a stiffer delivery. The audience responds with silence when Ellison issues his applause lines, and can someone get the man a remote control so he doesn't have to terrorize a minion with requests to change the slides? We know the topic doesn't lend itself to the crazed consumer fervor of something like the iPhone, but seriously, I can see attendees muttering "More like Bore-acle OpenWorld" under their breath as they step into the Market Street Cinema.

Jerry Yang, you're not helping the local economy. Silicon Valley unemployment reached 6.5 percent last month, up from 6.4 percent in July. It's the fourth month in a row that the number increased, reports Digital Daily. Hewlett-Packard recently announced it plans to cut 24,000 jobs, and an analyst said eBay needs to lose 1,500. But we're curious: Have any startups had layoffs? The snidely buoyant attitude of South of Market's bubble dwellers is unlikely to change until their friends start getting pink-slipped.

As a by-product of its recent merger with EDS, Hewlett-Packard announced a layoff of more than 24,000 jobs, or almost 8 percent of its workforce. The cuts are highest in support divisions — accounting, information technology, human relations, procurement and legal. But the main rationale of the layoffs is to refocus the combined company's computer-services division on high-end consulting, not low-end gruntwork. What’s worse is the timeframe: job cuts take place over three years. If you work at HP or EDS, your office has now become a professional hospice unit. Adding to the workplace angst: Some at HP, we hear, are getting bonuses even as their colleagues get pink slips. For those fretting about the potential loss of income in these troubling times, we offer the following suggestions on finding your next job or coping with survivor’s guilt.

Hewlett-Packard just announced it will cut 24,600 jobs over the next three years, as it integrates tech consultancy EDS. Half the cuts will take place in the U.S. The company is taking a $1.7 billion charge in the fourth quarter to account for the costs of shedding jobs. Layoffs always suck, but we never were sure what all of those IT consultants did, anyway. [WSJ]

A report by BusinessWeek says "employees in HP's PC division are exploring the possibility of building a mass-market operating system. HP's software would be based on Linux, but it would be simpler and easier for mainstream users." The threat is simple: A sub-$1,000 MacBook would knock a huge hole in HP's own notebook sales. Apple is only $100 away from that goal. The division's CTO insists "it's about innovating on top of Vista." But on top of is a misleading preposition for some of his company's modifications, which bypass Vista's built-in photo and video apps in favor of HP's own. (Illustration by Paul Blow/BusinessWeek)

The cult of Scientology can't keep the pulp science fiction and quack psychology of founder L. Ron Hubbard in print merely through sheer force of will. Instead, it's with a state-of-the-art production facility in Commerce, Calif. featuring the latest printers from Hewlett-Packard. The plant is owned by the church through a company called Bridge Publications, whose unique experience in modern print production was enough to land Blake Silber, vice president of production at Bridge, a seat on a discussion panel for print-production professionals sponsored by Hewlett-Packard scheduled for September 10th. How does HP help Bridge churn out thousands of copies of Dianetics and related books in multiple languages to use as gateway texts for indoctrination?Through fast prototyping made possible by HP's Indigo line of industrial printers. Thanks in part to the Indigo 5000, Bridge can print, bind, and shrink-wrap 22,090 copies of Scientology: A New Slant on Life in as little as a week. And as acolytes move up "the bridge to total freedom," they are required to buy further materials for study that, because of the increasingly elite membership, necessitate small runs. Thankfully, print-on-demand technology is here! When some sucker ponies up the five-figure sum necessary to pass through the "Wall of Fire" in order to become a level three "operating thetan," Bridge can whip up a copy of the Xenu myth in no time flat. And since all of the print production is done in-house, it allows leader David Miscavige and his disciples to keep a tight lock on potential leaks of "secrets" written in the embarrassingly bad prose of Hubbard. At the upcoming discussion, among the topics panelists address will be staffing and employee retention. There aren't a lot of press operators familiar with such cutting-edge technology. Luckily for Bridge, members of the church's paramilitary Sea Org — the true believers who often work as peons — have all signed contracts to serve for eternity. They couldn't jump ship for a rival printer or publisher if they wanted to — that old-time religion matched with the latest in HP's technology combine for a serious business advantage. There's no surprise that Scientology is run like a business. Making a profit was the reason why Hubbard came up with the religion in the first place. But here's what's really disturbing: Could HP be helping Scientology proselytize? The church has a history of recruiting members in business settings. If Silber talked about more than just print-on-demand technologies at his seminar, is should raise eyebrows among HP's many non-Scientology customers.

In theory, Microsoft's license agreement for Vista says you can get a refund from your PC's manufacturer if you buy a model with Vista preinstalled, but replace it with Windows XP, Linux or another operating system. In practice, Equlibriate blogger Kim Kido, a k a uncle_benji, spent two months calling and emailing HP before the company finally cut her a $200 check. She's posted a detailed recap of the story, including screenshots of customer service emails and a photo of the check. I'm willing to bet Kido cost the company another $200 in customer service time. (Photo by uncle_benji)