BAD HARDWARE WEEK

The board got wind of the sexual harassment settlement, discovered the phony "cougar" expense reports and gave HP CEO Hurd the ax.

Titillating? Mildly. The biggest scandal at HP? Hardly. The biggest scandals at HP haven't made the headlines because they are so commonplace in Great Recession Corporate America. CEOs in one company after another are throwing workers onto the unemployment rolls and dodging taxes to boost short-term profits and fatten their own paychecks. They are shifting the burden of a poor economy onto the public purse -- while continuing to line their own pockets.

Shortly after Mr. Hurd was forced out, Mr. Ellison made an unusual and passionate defense of him. In an e-mail to The New York Times, Mr. Ellison called the H.P. board’s action “the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.”