I could give another reply in the Mac-vs-PC ad discussion, but instead I’m just going to link to this:

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Apple’s direct competition isn’t Microsoft but instead PC makers who sell computers running Windows.

So *that*’s what she wants… or is it just another gaffe? Either way, we’re not going to find out, because suddenly Sarah’s ducking more events than Todd’s ducking subpoenas.

Two cancellations in Florida.

Two in California.

Two in Washington state.

At least one in Colorado.

And one in Wyoming.

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Last week the public learned through an inspector general’s report about the antics of a group of Bush political appointees in senior positions at the Department of the Interior. One of the subjects, Gregory W. Smith, managed relations with the oil and gas industry and was found to have taken gifts from clients. The IG report also detailed Smith’s illicit sexual relationships with subordinates, his purchases of cocaine at his office, and improper outside consulting deals that allowed him to earn more than $30,000. The IG report suggested a pattern in which bribes and sexual favors were used to help secure valuable government contracts.

So the ever vigilant Public Integrity Section at the Bush Justice Department is right on top of this matter, prosecuting the wrongdoers to uphold standards of public decency, right? Wrong. To the shock of the Inspector General, the Justice Department has decided that it will take no action in the case involving Smith and another senior political appointee at Interior. Why? The Justice Department believes it doesn’t owe the public any explanations, and it has the power to prosecute or not to prosecute as it sees fit.

Similar good news is arriving at the doorstep of former Florida Representative Mark Foley, whose sexually suggestive text messages to House pages stirred a national sensation in 2006. Foley refused to waive his legislative privilege, making it very difficult for law enforcement officials to probe much further into the matter. Now the Associated Press reports that the Justice Department appears prepared to let the Foley matter drop without criminal prosecution. If you’re trying to understand why the Justice Department under Bush has reached a modern low water level in public confidence, look no further.

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So how to differentiate the decision not to prosecute the coke-snorting, party-animal Bush appointees at Interior and the party-animal Congressman chasing after young pages from the 63-year-old school teacher in Alabama who kept bad time records and the prominent Pittsburgh medical examiner who had the indecency to make personal use of his fax machine? The latter two are Democrats.

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OK, a correspondent directs me to John McCain’s article, Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American, in the Sept./Oct. issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. You might want to be seated before reading this.

Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago — and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!

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Maybe they can create “MRI default swaps” or “collateral knee surgery obligations” or some other fun packaged security that could be sold to China. After all, why shouldn’t they have a say over whether or not you get your medication?

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Ameribank, Inc., was closed today by the Office of the Thrift Supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was named receiver. The FDIC entered into purchase and assumption agreements with Pioneer Community Bank, Inc., Iaeger, West Virginia, and The Citizens Savings Bank, Martins Ferry, Ohio to take over all of the deposits and certain assets of Ameribank, Inc., Northfork, West Virginia.

Compare photo 18 and 19

update: Here are the two pictures, and an animated gif of them switching places..

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On this day in 1941 a man named Witold Pilecki deliberately got himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Pilecki was a spy sent in to investigate the camp and establish underground resistance cells. He sent reports to Warsaw, which passed them to London. In 1942, his reports that prisoners were being gassed were not believed.

Pilecki’s extraordinary story was erased from after he was executed in 1948 as a anti-communist spy by his countrymen. Poland is now trying to restore his place in history. A movie about his life was made in 2006. The Polish parliament is trying to make the anniversary of Pilecki’s death a memorial of the struggle against tolitarianism.

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Flickr user LuisDS discovered metadata on the creative copy of the “stereotyped PC user” and other photos appearing on Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” website that reveal they were produced using Macs running Adobe Creative Suite 3.

Microsoft code monkeys scrubbed the identifying information from the website stills overnight.

Apart from the ha-ha-this-is-funny, here’s a question for you marketing people: how can you, as an advertising agency, be able to create compelling advertising for a product you yourself have rejected?

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A hacker claims to have cracked the web site of Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly and purloined a list of subscribers to the site, which includes their names, e-mail addresses, city and state, and the password they use for their registration to the site.

The attack was retaliation for comments that O’Reilly made on the air this week about web sites that published e-mails obtained from the Yahoo account of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, according to a press release distributed by WikiLeaks late Friday.

The hacker sent WikiLeaks a screenshot of O’Reilly’s subscriber list as proof of the deed, which WikiLeaks has posted online.

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In the video above, O’Reilly spoke with Amanda Carpenter, a reporter for Townhall.com who agreed with him and said that a web site that published such information was “complicit” in the hack of Palin’s e-mail account.

“They think it’s newsworthy, even though the information was absolutely, illegally obtained,” she said.

Neither O’Reilly nor Carpenter mentioned the First Amendment protection that media organizations, such as Fox News and Townhall.com, are generally afforded for publishing newsworthy information.

That segment was followed the next day by a segment with Fox News anchor, Megyn Kelly, a lawyer, who explained why the First Amendment would protect the sites. (See video below.)

O’Reilly, disagreed with her, however.

“If your grandma sends you 50 bucks for your birthday and somebody steals the letter and gives it to somebody else and they take the 50 bucks, they’re going to get charged as well as this person who stole the letter,” he said.

Kelly explained that taking stolen money and publishing news were not the same.

“That’s crazy,” he said.

“No it’s not crazy,” Kelly replied. “Because . . . what if somebody obtained a document illegally that proved some massive conspiracy among the presidential candidates and they leaked it to Fox News and we knew it was stolen. You don’t think we’d put it on the air? You’re darn right we would. And it’s not illegal.”

Will Mr. O’Reilly be notifying all of his subscribes of the breach? He might also want to point out that if someone has used the same password at BillOReilly.com and their email account, then the bad guys can potentially break into a lot of other Web site accounts.