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Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Near Launching Presidential Bid

Rambo Tribble writes Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina announced on Fox News Sunday that she stood a 'higher than 90 percent' chance of running as a presidential candidate in 2016. Fiorina's tenure at HP was marked by controversy over her leadership, and it is unclear what level of name recognition she enjoys. Her only previous political experience appears to be a failed U.S. Senate seat effort in 2010, as the Republican candidate challenging sitting Democrat Barbara Boxer, in California. Fiorina lost by 10%.

17 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. Never Forget Lucent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Don't forget she killed Lucent which resulted in Bell Labs being sold off to the French in a fire sale. She's evil. She's definitely prepared for a career in politics.

  2. Echo chamber by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What sort of echo chamber does this woman live in to think she's got a good record as a manager to run on? Romney at least made real money and ran a real state government. Fiorina started lots of pissing contests, got booted by the shareholders for loosing money and assets, and lost a senate (not even governor's) race. Wow.

    1. Re:Echo chamber by sjames · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Only if the alternate reality doesn't exist. She actually turned HP into a ruin of it's former self, but she also actually got a massive pile of cash for it and Lucent actually started waving money and stock offers at her before her seat was even cold. Then she actually left a smoking crater where Lucent used to be but she actually made big piles of cash doing it.

      That's the thing. She lives in an actual alternate reality where terminal fuck-ups are coveted.

      For the rest of us, no matter how many times you discharge the halon, EPO the datacenter and delete the database server and all of the backups, you won't make CEO money, so it is truly an alternate reality.

  3. Re:This is great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I thought they'd already merged. They both do pretty much the same thing when they're in power.

  4. Maybe she'd have luck as an independent? by damn_registrars · · Score: 3, Insightful

    She won't really stand out in the crowd of crazy that the GOP is already assembling.

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    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
  5. Re:Now I understand her record at HP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    She won big time,and yet HP lost

  6. Re:This is great! by sphealey · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What's a "Democrat Party"? Whig, Republican, Bull Moose, and Democratic are some major US political parties that come to mind but I don't recall a "Democrat Party" from the history textbooks.

    sPh

  7. As somebody who saw her in action by mykepredko · · Score: 4, Insightful

    during her tree felling heydays at HP, I'm not surprised at the chutzpah that would be required for her to think that she could be president.

    And her total lack of self-awareness to understand that she doesn't have a snow-ball's chance in hell.

    I don't see her being anything approaching a serious candidate.

    myke

  8. Yes, why stop at fucking up a company... by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...when you can fuck up the world? Yes, let's put an MBA with a BA in philosophy and medieval history in charge of the USA. I mean, wouldn't *you* give the nuclear codes to the MBAs in your company? What could possibly go wrong?

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    Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
  9. Re:Simplr math ... by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No it's not. The best way to not lose at a lottery is to not buy a ticket.

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    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  10. Re:Now I understand her record at HP by Darinbob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a CEO syndrome. You're surrounded all day by sycophants who claim you're the smartest, brightest, and wisest person they know. No matter what obscure VP you go to visit they all seem to recognize you on sight, so clearly you've got name and face recognition. All of your decisions are praised. Most of the time even the board of directors treat you like their best friend.

  11. Re:This is great! by catchblue22 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    She can follow up on her work at HP and merge the Democrat and Republican parties together. That should make things much more efficient, increase shareholder value and offer synergies to enhance international competition.

    Or she can sell off the US government's core technological assets and turn America into a hollow corporate brand name that creates almost nothing. Just like she did with HP when she sold off HP's advanced technology division as Agilent, and changed HP from a technological powerhouse into a brand-name for shitty computers and components.

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    This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
  12. Re:Simplr math ... by Moof123 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Plenty of HP/Agilent/Keysight folks will happily get in front of the camera to tell war stories about how effective she was at steering a very good and well loved company into the rocks. It broke into pieces that still limp on with the scars and damage that her bad management caused. The country is littered with old HP campuses that have been abandoned after off shoring and consolidation, in large part due to activities on her watch.

    Her appeal to the right is how effective she was at dehumanizing a culture that used to place great value on its people into 3 pieces that now tout "shareholder value" above valuing its people. Sadly the pieces are pretty un-special at even shareholder value these days. Bill and Dave have to be doing about 3600 rpm in their graves.

  13. Re:So she can do to the US... by Moof123 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    1. libertarians are not anarchists and do not believe in 'no government.'
    2. expecting the government to operate within budget like everyone else is not anarchy. ...

    1. Libertarians want minimal government, but not one that collects taxes, just one with enough army to enforce all the contracts they want the world to run on. And they want that army to be paid for by someone else, not them. I am pretty sure they miss company towns and want to bring back that model to the whole country, but with th emight of the US military to back it up and give it legitimacy this time around.

    2. They expect the government to operate within a budget, but they want that budget to be $0. The whole notion they have is to "starve the beast", to set the budget low enough that the government is bound to be both badly run, and to badly overrun their budget by design. In so doing they can show the A) government doesn't work, and B) government doesn't stay within its budget so that they can be justified in destroying departments or installing their cronies using an invented crisis to further erode it from the inside.

    Take Social Security for example. Rather than do something minimal like removing the income cap for taxation, or raising the tax by 2% to cover the long term demographic driven shortfall, they want to burn the whole thing down. We would be better off lower the retirement age than raising it, but the debate has already been pulled so far to the right you can't even talk about improving social security, you can only argue about how big the cuts *MUST* be to save the program.

    I heard a lot of Libertarian ranting from my grandfather who spent much of his life in the John Birch society, and spent most of his later years running a small group trying to get income taxes repealed. So yeah, I have heard a lot of the crazy behind Libertarian ideas. It is a fantasyland for the most part. It has gotten recent attention thanks to our two major parties screwing up so bad that folks are ready to vote for the "anything else" option more so than ever before.

  14. Re:This is great! by Greg_D · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Some of us got past the mentality of a 10 year old who still thinks their mother picks on them. You'll get there one day, champ.

  15. Re:Simplr math ... by silentcoder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Palin, Bachman, Fiorina... she certainly fits the mould of the average republican female candidate: "I have a vagina and I'm not afraid to insert my head into the cavity right next to it !"

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    Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  16. Re:Simplr math ... by silentcoder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And of course the irony is that their ideology never actually works, but it does turn them into valuable useful idiots.
    The sincere ones among them want to cut things like crony-capitalism, regulatory capture and corporate welfare as well.
    But that NEVER happens, instead by using their support for "small government" big business simply gets to have government plunder all the actual services it provides, and social safety netts and hand over the results to MORE crony capitalism.
    I think the perfect example was Denver where the local government basically just took everybody's pensions because they "couldn't afford to pay them anymore" - but never cut a penny of their corporate welfare bill - which could have paid the pension liabilities ten times over !

    Even their lord and saviour Ronald Reagan pulled of the scam perfectly. In theory the Laffer-curve based tax-cut concept is that you cut taxes for EVERYBODY, so EVERYBODY has more money, people spend it to buy things - and this means more business open (since there are customers to supply) so that means more jobs - and so even though you cut taxes very soon your revenues are higher than before. It ONLY works if you are AT the Laffer curve peak -any other time the tax cuts will simply mean less revenue, and the theory also demands that when you do it you cut ALL spending to the bone so you stay liquid until the increased revenue realizes, at which point you are supposed to end the austerity and use this higher revenue to fund bigger projects and MORE expansive social safety netts.

    But you won't hear THAT from the politicians, they take a sound economic theory out of it's very narrow context and then apply it across the board - and what's worse, they only apply half of it. What DID Reagan do ?
    He cut taxes only on the rich, then he increased spending - a LOT - especially on the military, and cut the social safety nett.
    That's been the republican playbook ever since despite that fact that it never worked once in all that time. Well worked at what they said it would do - as a means of handing over poor and middle class folk's taxes to rich people it works brilliantly.

    And the small government libertarians are the idiots who keep electing them because they promise to make government smaller and still haven't figured out the scam.

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    Unicode killed the ASCII-art *