Free Republic

Liberals won't like it. If Ted Cruz is elected president, he has big plans for the Supreme Court -- namely, picking extremely conservative candidates to fill any vacancies among the nine justices. In an interview with Bloomberg, the Senator and former solicitor general from Texas said that Republicans are generally bad at picking nominees for the high court, and that he'd be different. "Unlike many of the other candidates, I will be willing to spend the capital to ensure that every Supreme Court nominee that I put on the court is a principled judicial conservative," Cruz said. As solicitor general,...

When Carly Fiorina ran for U.S. Senate, opponents depicted the former corporate executive as a cold-hearted job killer, using her past statements like a noose around her neck. Americans have no God-given right to a job, said the former Hewlett-Packard chief. When you’re talking about massive layoffs, sometimes they’re warranted. Off-shoring — shipping American jobs overseas — was “right-shoring.” Now, though, running for president, Fiorina has softened her tone, acknowledging the human toll of lost jobs and explaining at greater length and depth the actions she took as a powerful Silicon Valley executive, including overseeing tens of thousands of layoffs....

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...

Here is the 218-page opposition research report on Carly Fiorina compiled by political research firm Gragert Jones for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in April 2010.

Fiorina, pictured in 1999, says on the campaign trail that she had to burn down Hewlett Packard in order to save it. Carly Fiorina’s business background is an essential part of the story she tells on the campaign trail, offering an “only in America” biographical tale of her journey from secretary to CEO. Yet the crowning achievement of her corporate career -- her tenure as a Fortune 500 CEO at Hewlett-Packard -- isn't central to her stump speech. Repeating the same lines from stop to stop, Fiorina rails against an "inept, corrupt bureaucracy." She offers herself up as a leader...

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...

Some who know Fiorina’s business background believe her ascension to the White House would be ruinous for the nation. One candidate has seen her fortunes rise following a stand-out debate performance last week: Carly Fiorina. The former corporate leader shot up from well back in the polls to second place in the pack, with 15 percent support, while Trump’s lead fell from 32 to 24 percent. However, some who know Fiorina’s business background believe her ascension to the White House would be ruinous for the nation. During last week’s CNN debate, her time as Hewlett-Packard CEO came under scrutiny. Moderator...

Ex-staffers have harsh words for Republican presidential candidate. Carly Fiorina apparently left a trail of unpaid, unhappy campaign staffers after her unsuccessful 2010 U.S. Senate bid. According to Reuters, the former HP CEO and 2016 Republican presidential hopeful waited more than four years to give her campaign staff the compensation they were promised. “Federal campaign filings show that, until a few months before Fiorina announced her presidential bid on May 4, she still owed staffers, consultants, strategists, legal experts and vendors nearly half a million dollars,” Reuters reported. Twelve ex-Fiorina campaign workers told Reuters that, if given the chance to...

Carly Fiorina said on The Tonight Show that her track record at HP included improving market share. But that’s not true. Carly Fiorina’s latest defense of her track record at Hewlett Packard doesn’t quite add up. Monday night, on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, the GOP Presidential hopeful stepped up her effort to paint her time at the top of one of the nation’s largest technology companies as a success. Fallon remarked that her rise from a secretary at a small real estate company to the head of HP HPQ -2.42% was remarkable, but he also mentioned critics who...

As Fiorina admits, I have been critical of her for over a decade—long before she announced her political aspirations. I have studied her business record, challenged her leadership abilities and have come to agree with the assessment that she was one of the worst technology CEOs in history. I stand by that evaluation. Fiorina can attack me all she wants, as she did when she called me “a well-known Clintonite” (an absurd allegation I’ll get to later) who “had it out for me from the moment that I arrived at Hewlett Packard.” But no amount of one-liners to Trump, weekend...

Before she became the controversial CEO of HP, Senate candidate Carly Fiorina was a star at Lucent. What does her time at the telecom disaster say about her? In the spring of 1999, Lucent Technology’s star executive Carly Fiorina pulled off yet another coup—or so it appeared. A tiny start-up called PathNet agreed to buy huge amounts of fiber-optic gear from Lucent, a deal worth at least $440 million and potentially as much as $2.1 billion. The agreement Fiorina negotiated “potentially represents the single largest fiber supply agreement to a network operator in the U.S,” according to a triumphant press...

She’s running for President on her track record as CEO of HP, but if that’s the case, Fiorina might want to rethink her strategy. Fresh from strong debate quips, Carly Fiorina has improbably raced from 14th to fifth place in the New Hampshire Republican primary polls and now enjoys a 70% favorability rating in Iowa, ahead of such career politicians as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, George Pataki, and Lindsay Graham. It is time to take her candidacy seriously and examine her leadership record. Having never held elected office, she has staked her...

What amazed me about the latest “Billionaire” issue of Forbes magazine was not the stories about the billionaires, but about Forbes itself. See the amazing graph below. For years we’ve been told the print media is dead, that digital media (like Forbes.com, wsj.com, etc.) was the wave of the future. As the graph shows, Forbes magazine is not only surviving, but thriving, and now has 7 million readers. Yet Forbes is an outlier. The rest of the print media is going down, slowly but surely. In the past two years, circulation for Fortune, the Economist and even the mighty Wall...

The West shouldn’t stoke the fires engulfing Russia’s wounded economy. Talk in Washington and Brussels this week of levying further economic sanctions on Russia seems counterproductive and will only make matters worse for all parties involved. Like it or not, Russia’s economy has grown simply “too big to fail,” and its political and military might is too dangerous to ignore. The West might have better luck in advancing its goals in the region by helping, not hurting, the Russian bear in its time of need.

...the study provides the strongest evidence yet that the upsurge quakes in the past decade across Central and mid-America is at least partially to be blamed on humans. More than 300 earthquakes have occurred from 2010 to 2012 compared to an average rate of 21 every year from 1967 to 2000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Most have ranged from 2.0 to 3.6 on the Richter scale but there have been exceptions, including a 5.6 event in central Oklahoma in November 2011 that destroyed 14 homes and injured two people.

Wednesday, 'Wheel of Fortune' had a very inspirational contestant in Trent Girone. The 21-year-old Peoria, Ariz., resident is a self-described "Wheel of Fortune" fanatic, but more important, he's the first special needs contestant ever to compete on the show.Girone has had nine brain surgeries and has both Asperger's and Tourette's syndromes, but that didn't stop him from taking early control of the wheel by successfully guessing the first puzzle, "a smashing success." Girone ultimately didn't win the game -- he hit the dreaded Bankrupt slot -- but he won viewer hearts from coast-to-coast.  WATCH:

A contestant named Julian from Indiana University must be feeling pretty stupid right about now. And Hoosiers can't be feeling too proud. Julian had the chance to win $1 million Friday night, had the puzzle fully solved, and then lost because he pronounced Achilles like “A-chill-us.” Because of that mistake, the show decided not to give him the victory and instead, one of the other contestants who know the “mythological hero” got the chance to steal and did. (To win the full $1 million he would have had to overcome some other hurdles as well.) But alas, poor Julian' disastrous...

Pope Francis was named the world's greatest leader by Fortune magazine, topping a diverse list released Thursday. Fortune’s first list of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders includes a Hollywood actress, a baseball superstar, a teenage education advocate and the president of a small California college. It also includes a former American president, but the current one failed to make the cut. Former President Bill Clinton ranks No. 5 on the list, selected for being a “relentless and forceful advocate” in numerous causes, but noticeably absent is one of his successors and the current leader of the free world. "President Obama...

Elizabeth Warren has been plagued throughout her campaign for a Massachusetts Senate seat by what appear to fibs of her own creation. It began when claimed to be Cherokee, because her “Papa” (pronounced “Papauw”) had high cheekbones, and there was “family lore.” She reportedly rode that claim all the way to Harvard, where she was pronounced a “minority professor,” when in reality, a genealogist found she is a scant 1/32 Cherokee. Now, the woman who claims to have created the “intellectual foundation” for Occupy Wall Street– notorious for its anti-foreclosure actions– is revealed to have made a small fortune flipping...