Free Republic

Barbara Boxer, the senator from California, leaned over her press secretary, Peter True, as he sat at an HP desktop computer and tried to find an old campaign ad from 2010. Boxer wanted me to see the ad because it featured interviews with former employees of HP who had been laid off by the storied technology company’s one-time CEO, Carly Fiorina, who in 2010 challenged Boxer for her seat and now, five years later, seeks the Republican nomination for a somewhat higher office: president of the United States. -snip- Fiorina was, in Boxer’s telling, a monstrously greedy businesswoman who would...

For over three decades, Carly Fiorina's bachelor's degree from Stanford University in medieval history and philosophy has had little real-world application. But as she mounts a presidential bid, the Republican candidate says her degree is finally of use as she considers how she would deal with ISIS as commander-in-chief. "Finally my degree in medieval history and philosophy has come in handy," Fiorina said Sunday night, "because what ISIS wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally." Fiorina was responding to a question from a member of the military at a town hall in Windham, New Hampshire,...

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina may not be a liberal, but she certainly appears to be a fan of the liberal arts. The 2016 contender said Monday that her college degree in medieval history made her uniquely qualified to combat ISIS and other terrorist groups. “My degree in medieval history and philosophy has come in handy,” Fiorina said at a town hall in Windham, N.H., “because what ISIS wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally.”

Carly Fiorina received a BA from Stanford in medieval history and philosophy almost 40 years ago, but she’s always ready to revisit her undergraduate glory days. Last Sunday, the Republican presidential candidate tried to burnish her national security credentials by claiming that her bachelor’s degree prepared her to fight Isis. She said: “Finally my degree in medieval history and philosophy has come in handy, because what Isis wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally”. I’d like to state unequivocally that my years of training to become a professor of medieval history in no way make...

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina shot back at a Washington Post story stating that her 2010 Senate campaign mismanaged its finances, including not giving a final paycheck to the widow of her pollster, who died a month before Election Day. According to MSNBC, Fiorina assailed "the left and their allies in the media" for the story, which was based on more than two dozen interviews with staff members, friends, contractors and operatives who worked on the 2010 Senate campaign. All said there was a huge problem with the operation: It didn't manage money well. Fiorina said Monday that The Post...

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina attacked "the left and their allies in the media" for a critical report released Monday that says her 2010 California Senate campaign mismanaged money and failed to pay vendors for their work. More than four years after the failed campaign, Fiorina still owed nearly half a million dollars to 30 entities. She didn't pay off her debt until January of 2015, just a few months before she launched her presidential bid. One of the outstanding payments due was to her political strategist Joe Shumate who died one month before Election Day as first reported by...

Carly Fiorina's 2010 Senate campaign had a big problem with money. As our colleague Robert Samuels reported, it took years for Fiorina to settle about $500,000 worth of invoices after she lost the race in California -- despite reimbursing herself nearly $1.3 million she lent the campaign. Fiorina didn't pay the widow of her pollster at least $30,000 he was owed for his last paycheck after the race was lost. He died about a month before Election Day.

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is rebutting a Washington Post story that details a pattern of delayed payments to staff and contractors after her 2010 Senate campaign in California. According to the piece, Fiorina, the wealthy former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, waited until January, a few months before announcing her 2016 presidential bid, to settle most of the more than 30 invoices outstanding from her last campaign - a total of about $500,000. She was quicker to reimburse herself the $1.3 million she lent the campaign. Fiorina, when asked about the article Monday, dismissed it. "You know I don't think the...

Nothing has defined Carly Forina's presidential campaign quite like her outspoken opposition to Planned Parenthood — a point she has brought up repeatedly at debates and press conferences. It might seem odd, then, that her Fiorina Foundation has given half a million dollars to Planned Parenthood since 2011. The Fiorina Foundation isn't actually, legally, a foundation, per se; it's an account Fiorina and her husband hold with The Ayco Charitable Foundation, a "donor-advised fund" that stashes charitable donations for clients in case they want to quickly receive tax benefits, The Daily Beast explains. One expert on the topic described it...

... Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina made a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple’s wildly successful product. Nonetheless, HP still managed to botch things. ... If it were a straight deal for HP to include Apple’s software, the fee might have been hundreds of millions of dollars. (Around that time, software companies were paying huge sums to have their products or services preinstalled, since people seldom deleted them and often used the default choices.) Even better, preinstalling iTunes was a way for Apple to stifle Microsoft’s competitor to the iTunes Music Store. As an Apple leader at...

While Carly Fiorina has unquestionable debate skills, the more I research her background, the more troubled I become. While it's clear that she is -- politically speaking -- somewhere to the left of Jeb Bush on policy, it is her business record that is most alarming. Let me start with a little history lesson and a company called Lernout & Houspie. Founded in 1987 by two Belgians, L&H went public in 1995 on NASDAQ and operated from U.S. headquarters in Burlington, MA. Specializing in voice recognition software, L&H rode the tech boom to a peak market valuation of $10 billion....

In the week since Wednesday’s contentious GOP debate, Carly Fiorina has walked away the winner—both on social media and in the polls. She peaked in Google searches when mentioning her daughter—who passed away from an overdose—in response to a question about drug reform, earned the biggest applause of the night by cooly but deftly responding to Donald Trump’s criticisms of her appearance, and painted herself as a Washington outsider in a race where non-politicians like neurosurgeon Ben Carson and real estate mogul Trump are leading the pack. -snip- Much like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns during the 2008 subprime mortgage...

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...

In late 2010, polls showed Carly Fiorina within a point or two of beating California’s Democratic incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer. The Republican candidate was impressing on the trail and gaining traction with voters, much like she is now as a Republican presidential contender. And then the attack ads began. “Thirty thousand Californians lost their jobs,” the narrator of an ad released in mid-September said of Fiorina’s legacy as CEO of the Silicon Valley tech giant Hewlett Packard. “Fiorina tripled her salary, bought a million dollar yacht, and five corporate jets.” Her poll numbers dipped — and they never quite recovered....

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...

That Carly Fiorina was a one-woman wrecking crew during her tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard was never in doubt. But what follows is a tale that is now being picked up and distributed as the Republican Party seeks a nominee who combines business savvy and executive know-how. Sadly, the former executive who most closely fits this particular bill also has exhibited the kind of corporate arrogance and blind certitude that came close to sinking what had been considered among the world’s best technology companies: Hewlett-Packard. At HP beginning in the mid-1990s, Fiorina was responsible for the ill-fated merger with Compaq,...

Carly Fiorina has taken a hard line against Planned Parenthood as a Republican presidential candidate, but in 2005 she invested in a health care website similar to WebMD that touted abortion benefits and directed users to Planned Parenthood. The Revolution Health Group website assured users abortion is safe and directed them to pro-choice groups including Planned Parenthood for more information, but did not link to any pro-life groups or offer a pro-choice perspective. Fiorina joined RHG as an investor and board member when it was founded in 2005. Her campaign did not respond to requests for comment regarding her knowledge...

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.

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...