Free Republic

Carly Fiorina may come from the executive suite, but that hasn’t stopped other executives from slamming her record. The latest critique comes from Steven Rattner, a former Wall Street banker and private equity executive. Rattner, in an opinion piece in the New York Times on Saturday, called Fiorina’s time as the CEO of HP “short and disastrous.” Rattner said HP’s acquisition of Compaq, pushed through by Fiorina, caused an amount of divisiveness at the company that Rattner says he never saw in his 33-year career on Wall Street. He said that while Fiorina did serve during a tough period for...

HER silver tongue honed by decades in corporate marketing, Carly Fiorina has used two debates, and a steely determination on the campaign trail, to climb near the top of the polls for the Republican nomination. But Americans should pause on her biggest professional credential for our highest office: a short, disastrous stint atop one of America’s iconic technology companies, Hewlett-Packard. The clearest measure of her performance — and the report card preferred by Wall Street — is H.P.’s stock price, which dropped by 52 percent during her tenure of almost six years. Yes, Mrs. Fiorina served during the worst fall...

For those of us that live in California, there’s a palpable deja vu in Carly Fiorina’s declaration to run for president on the Republican ticket. Smatterings of those late night TV advertisements are still sloshing around our brains. Her campaign positions her as the outsider, the embodiment of the American dream. As her website informs us, “Only in the United States of America can a young woman start as a secretary and work to become Chief Executive of one of the largest technology companies in the world.” Implicit in that leap is the kind of power that is a companion...

New Black Panther Party leader Malik Zulu ShabazzThe conservative blogosphere is brewing with ominous warnings about the inevitable riots they think will come if George Zimmerman is acquitted of charges related to his killing of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin. (My colleague Lauren Williams has rightly questioned this mania here.) An email this week from Everett Wilkinson, a former tea party leader in Florida who now runs something called the Nation Liberty Federation, outlines many of the leading (and recurring) conspiracy theories about the verdict's aftermath, which he naturally thinks will include riots: martial law. FEMA camps. But he offers up...

For Kiley Miller and John Rzeczycki, owners of 160 acres of wild desert outside Moab, Utah, Easter brings jeeps. Hummers, too, and modified pickups, and stripped-down rock crawlers—by the tens of thousands they descend on Moab for the annual Easter Jeep Safari, one of the nation's largest off-road-vehicle events. The jeeps whine through gears on a windswept uplift named Black Ridge near the couple's property, leaving a spoor of beer cans and brake fluid. Once, a group of jeepers left a message on one of the Private Property signs Miller and Rzeczyckihad put up—a noose, as carefully knotted as a...