The $500,000 Limit Is Not Enough — good article from Eliot Spitzer on ways to get crazy CEO pay under control.

Now here’s a scary thought: “Nearly all internal briefings in the Pentagon these days are presented as PowerPoint slides. Officials told me three years ago that if an officer wanted to make a case for a war plan or a weapons program or just about anything, he or she had better make the case in PowerPoint—or forget about getting it approved.” — “PowerPoint to the People“

Uh, wow. Just saw an ad for Hyundai Assurance, a program that lets you return a newly financed/leased vehicle within a year if you “lose your income.” It’s a white-label for a program called WalkAway, a name which has an oddly threatening tone to my ear. Anyway, between this and Chrysler’s new “Employee Pricing Plus Plus,” I wonder how long it will be before they throw in 1,000 shares of the automaker’s stock with each new car purchase.

Tesco: ‘Wal-Mart’s Worst Nightmare’. Be nice to see somebody put Walmart on the defensive. I like the concept, too (even used the branding as an example in a focus group, as I recall…)

Imagine a president-elect doing this today: “John Quincy Adams, according to his own letters, placed his hand on a constitutional law volume rather than a Bible to indicate where his fealty lay.” —Slate

Letter from Iceland: “Holidaymakers and business travellers venturing ’til Útlanda’, as it is called, found their credit cards refused.” That was just 2 weeks after we returned from Iceland. Good thing it didn’t implode while we were there… (A point of comparison: my credit card statement shows a 23 Sep purchase for ISK28,500 as US$301.93. Under two months later, and the conversion is now US$203.04.)

United’s Door-to-Door baggage service: save the hassle of bringing your luggage to and from the airport…by spending $149+ per bag to have it FedEx’d the day before? Uh, what? Who thought that would take off?

Unbelievable. From Portfolio’s “The End of Wall Street” article: “In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.”

Good stuff: Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comment” on CA’s Prop 8 (video).

So Pepsi has a new logo… looks a little like Korean Air in a can to me. I prefer Coke’s pared-down approach.

Clever little YouTube video: The Vet Who Did Not Vet.

Registration fraud does not equal voter fraud. (So “Mickey Mouse” registered. How’s that going to affect an election?) And all this ACORN whining? Give me a break.

Long, but illuminating: Rolling Stone on John McCain.

Gotta love the attention to detail:

Harris is a stickler for this sort of thing. When he restored Hitchcock’s Vertigo, he asked Jaguar to send him a color chip from the 1957 model of one of its cars—the same car that Kim Novak drove in the film—so that he could match the shade of green exactly.

— Your DVD Player Sleeps With the Fishes

Nerdery + politics + good branding = the trifecta! Hot. (via df)