Carly Fiorina’s quiet outreach to state party chairs in recent days has top Republicans speculating that she’s laying the groundwork for a Republican National Committee chairmanship bid.
Fiorina’s advisers have reached out to more than a dozen state parties telling them that the former GOP presidential hopeful is prepared to help in “any way,” offering up her personal phone number, and informing them that she would like to connect with their respective state party chairperson.
She is expected to spend much of August on a cross-country blitz. Her travel will take her to Virginia, where she will co-host an event in Virginia with Ed Gillespie, a former RNC chair who is running for governor in 2017. The event, which is being sponsored by Gillespie’s political action committee, is being billed as “a conversation about job creation and economic growth.” Also slated to attend is Morton Blackwell, a conservative activist from Virginia who has served as an RNC member for nearly three decades.
She will also be in Colorado, where party officials are in the process of finalizing a campaign event featuring her and endangered GOP Rep. Mike Coffman, and Louisiana, where Fiorina is expected to assist state legislative hopefuls. Next month, she is slated to be in Michigan for the Kent County Lincoln Day dinner. (Read more from “GOP Buzzing About Fiorina as RNC Head” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/Carly_Fiorina_13045502775.jpg8531280Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2016-08-10 01:34:402016-08-10 01:34:40GOP Buzzing About Fiorina as RNC Head
Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina took a brutal 14-word jab at Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton during Thursday’s undercard GOP debate.
“Unlike another woman in this race, I actually love spending time with my husband,” Fiorina said.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00kathleenhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngkathleen2016-01-15 00:06:082016-04-11 10:53:49Carly Fiorina Stings Hillary Clinton With Brutal 14-Word Jab: ‘Unlike Another Woman in This Race…’
Carly Fiorina has officially made it onto the short list of candidates being considered by the Koch Brothers’ network of donors — potentially opening the door to a deep pool of money.
Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers’ umbrella group, which includes a sprawling network of conservative donors, confirmed to ABC News that Fiorina is one of the five candidates on the donor network’s watch list.
“Governor Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio are leading a thoughtful and substantive discussion on the issues and we look forward to hearing more about their vision for the country,” Freedom Partners spokesman James Davis told ABC News.
Fiorina’s addition to list serves as a signal that her newly attained top-tier status is being taken seriously by conservative donors and will likely mean increased access for Fiorina to Freedom Partners’ deep-pocketed donors.
The news also comes after Reuters reported earlier this week that the Koch Brothers were taking a “serious look” at Fiorina following her strong debate performances and subsequent jump in the polls. (Read more from “Carly Fiorina Added to Koch Brothers’ Short List” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-10-08 00:48:212016-04-11 10:57:38Carly Fiorina Added to Koch Brothers’ Short List
By Randy DeSoto. Carly Fiorina has made defunding Planned Parenthood a top priority; but the organization that controls her charity, the Fiorina Foundation, has given nearly a half-a-million dollars to the group.
The Daily Beast reports that the Ayco Foundation (a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs), which controls the Fiorina Foundation, distributed $467,275 from 2011 to 2013 to various Planned Parenthoods, including those in New York City, Connecticut, and Indiana.
The Daily Beast described the arrangement that the Fiorina Foundation has with Ayco as akin to “a charitable savings account.” “The Ayco Charitable Foundation [is] a so-called ‘donor-advised fund,’ through which [the Fiorinas] distribute undisclosed sums to undisclosed recipients at undisclosed times,” according to the news outlet.
By contributing to the account, donors give up control of their cash or assets immediately and take the tax benefits, and then later advise the foundation what charities they would like to support.
Donor advised funds, like Ayco, do not disclose whose money gets donated to the various organizations to which the foundation contributes, so funds Fiorina and her husband contributed may or may not have gone to Planned Parenthood . . .
When Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager, Sarch Isgur Flores, was asked about the Planned Parenthood donations by Ayco, she said: “The Fiorinas absolutely have say over where their money goes and don’t have say over where other people’s money goes.” (Read more from “Revealed: Exactly Who Carly Fiorina’s Charity Donated $500,000 to – It Will Disturb You” HERE)
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The Organization That Runs Carly Fiorina’s ‘Foundation’ Has Given Half a Million Dollars to Planned Parenthood
By The Week. Nothing has defined Carly Fiorina’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 is run by an organization that 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 as “a charitable savings account”; Fiorina’s account just happens to be run by a charitable foundation, Ayco, that gives money to her supposed archenemy, distributing money to five Planned Parenthoods across New York, Connecticut, and Indiana:
If Fiorina feels as strongly as she claims that it’s an abomination for American tax dollars — including hers — to be forced to help fund Planned Parenthood, it’s perplexing that she would elect to be associated with any group that feels comfortable giving money to Planned Parenthood by choice — on behalf of an individual or not.
Asked if Fiorina has a problem with Ayco distributing funds to Planned Parenthood, and if she’s ever lobbied them to stop, [Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur] Flores said, “Carly has no control over those clients and their giving preferences.”
Asked why Fiorina doesn’t just find a donor-advised fund that vows never to give money to Planned Parenthood on behalf of anyone, Flores didn’t respond. [The Daily Beast]
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-10-05 22:31:422016-04-11 10:57:41Revealed: Exactly Who Carly Fiorina’s Charity Donated $500,000 to – It Will Disturb You
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.
L&H, despite its rise, was dogged by rumors of financial fraud. By early 1999, The Wall Street Journal reported that its earnings had been inflated. A subsequent WSJ investigation led to revelations in August of 2000 that much of the company’s value had been achieved by booking imaginary sales through a wide range of accounting gimmicks.
In April 2001, the founders — Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, as well as former CEO Gaston Bastiaens — were arrested in what was then one of the largest accounting scandals in history.
What were the accounting gimmicks that L&H used? Among them, “investing” in companies that were then required to turn those investments around to “purchase” L&H products and services. As the WSJ reported:
The company … appears to have improperly reported revenue from barter deals with other software firms in which no cash changed hands; immediately recognized revenue for sales that were contingent on L&H later performing development work for the customer; and sometimes reported sales before contracts were signed, when it was unclear the customer had the ability to pay or when the customer’s ability to pay depended on investment from L&H… In all, tens of millions of dollars in revenue over the past several years may have been improperly recorded…
Thousands of individual shareholders have lost a collective fortune in the fall of a company whose market value was nearly $10 billion nine months ago…
…Michael Faherty, a former L&H salesman in the U.S., says he and others were encouraged to refer potential but cash-poor customers to FLV Fund. “If FLV invests $1 million” in the customer, he says, “it was understood that we’d get about $300,000” in the form of license fees paid by that customer to L&H…
… In 1995, for example, FLV took a 49% stake in the Belgian unit of Quarterdeck Corp., a highflying California software company headed by another Belgian, Gaston Bastiaens. This Belgian unit became L&H’s largest customer, accounting for 30% of revenue that year, and Quarterdeck itself chipped in 6.5% of L&H’s sales…
In simple terms, L&H laundered loans and investments to other companies, which it then booked as phony sales.
And what happened to the founders, Lernout and Houspie? In 2010, they “were found guilty by a Belgian court of fraud violations in the accounting scandal [and] each given sentences of five years…”
So what does all of this have to do with Carly Fiorina?
Well, Fiorina ran the telecom giant Lucent as it was imploding, a fact that she was able to conceal until after she’d jumped ship to HP with over $60 million in performance-based pay.
A series of major orders were announced under Fiorina that subsequently turned out to be completely fraudulent. In 1999, for example, Fiorina trumpeted a huge sale of up to $2.1 billion of equipment to a company called PathNet. Problem was, however, that PathNet’s annual revenue was $1.6 million and it could ill afford such a massive purchase. In other words, Fiorina’s PathNet deal was as crooked as a corkscrew:
In the giant PathNet deal that Fiorina oversaw, Lucent agreed to fund more than 100% of the company’s equipment purchases, meaning the small company would get both Lucent gear at no money down and extra cash to boot. Yet how could such a loan to PathNet make sense for Lucent, even based on the world as it appeared in the heady days of 1999?
It didn’t make any financial sense. Just after Fiorina’s departure, Lucent revealed that it had written $7 billion of loan deals to customers, many of them unviable startups like PathNet, which itself went bankrupt in 2001. Post-Fiorina, Lucent also collapsed as the nature of her vendor-financing deals became obvious; but she walked away with upwards of $60 million.
In short, Fiorina used the same fraudulent tactics that L&H employed, investing in companies in order to massively inflate sales numbers.
Unlike Lernout and Houspie, though, Fiorina jumped ship before the implosion and walked away with tens of millions of dollars.
Fiorina, based upon these reports, has a distinctly unsavory background and has as much business running for president as Hillary Clinton does. Which is to say, none. (Read more from “Fiorina Engaged in Criminal Activity?” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-09-30 03:59:092016-04-11 10:57:53People Have Been Thrown in Prison for the Kinds of Stuff Carly Fiorina Engaged in as Lucent’s CEO
By Alex Swoyer. Planned Parenthood paid some of its supporters who threw condoms at GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina and at her supporters during an Iowa Hawkeye tailgate on Saturday.
The payments were briefly mentioned in a story by the New York Times. “On Saturday, women wearing pink, some of wh [om were paid by Planned Parenthood, protested Mrs. Fiorina at a campaign appearance in Iowa, throwing condoms and chanting, ‘Women are watching, and we vote,’” reported the New York Times . . .
Abortions comprise roughly three percent of medical services provided each year by Planned Parenthood [but, along with related “services” – including the baby body parts trade – comprise a much, much greater percentage of the organization’s annual revenue]. The group completed 327,653 abortions during its 2013-2014 financial year. Planned Parenthood receives roughly $542 million dollars from tax-payers each year. (Read more from “Planned Parenthood Paid Protesters to Do This Disgusting Thing to Carly Fiorina” HERE)
By David Weigel. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) was perplexed. Two long months had passed since the Center for Medical Progress started releasing undercover videos in which current and former Planned Parenthood employees described the grim economics of fetal tissue harvesting. Since then, a long congressional recess had come and gone and Republican-run states had redoubled their efforts to defund the family planning titan. Yet in the most recent poll from Reuters/Ipsos, 54 percent of voters still favored federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
“Those numbers are news to me,” said King. “I haven’t paid any attention to the polls. But am I surprised? Yes. That would explain some of the reasons why the leadership is not committing to defund.”
Since King made that analysis, the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has returned from the field, with even better news for Planned Parenthood. The full poll, to be released today, will find that the group’s favorable rating is slightly up since the July release of the videos, from 45-30 percent favorable-unfavorable to 47-31 percent. Going into Tuesday’s 10 a.m. congressional hearing on the group, a well-hyped showdown between the GOP and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, the video campaign appears not to have shifted public opinion on federal defunding.
“This is something the pro-life movement has been trying to educate people about for many years,” said Mallory Quigley, spokeswoman for the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List. “I’ve seen polling that finds even some people who consider themselves pro-life don’t know that Planned Parenthood performs abortions. When you’ve got President Obama and Miss America telling the lie for you, it goes a long way. I grew up with Judy Blume books, where the last couple pages would tell you that you should go to Planned Parenthood for health services.”
The sturdiness of support for Planned Parenthood stands out in a field of anti-abortion victories. For seven years, until 2015, more Americans told Gallup pollsters they were “pro-life” than “pro-choice.” Activists have credited even the omnipresence of social media, and the attendant photos of babies and sonograms, for building a culture of life. It’s allowed the movement to talk over the mainstream press and the dominant, progressive cultural voices. It hasn’t been able to talk over the Planned Parenthood defense squad. (Read more from this story HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00kathleenhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngkathleen2015-09-29 00:12:312016-04-11 10:57:54Planned Parenthood Paid Protesters to Do This Disgusting Thing to Carly Fiorina
Ben Carson’s comment that he would not support a Shariah-compliant Muslim for president because Islamic law is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution led to the former brain surgeon’s roasting among media talkers and politicians of all stripes . . .
“For any candidate to suggest that someone should not be elected president because of what he or she may believe is nothing short of religious bigotry,” said Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., one of two Muslim congressmen.
But what do American Muslims believe?
The Council on America-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which has been most vocal in its calls for Carson’s withdrawal from the GOP presidential race, claims to speak for American Muslims. The organization has a long history of ties to terrorists, as documented by WND’s “Rogues gallery of terror-tied leaders,” but it is still treated by most U.S. media as the Muslim equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union . . .
A poll commissioned in May 2015 by the Center for Security Policy showed that 51 percent of American Muslims preferred that they should have their own Shariah courts outside of the legal system ruled by the U.S. Constitution. And nearly a quarter believed the use of violent jihad was justified in establishing Shariah. (Read more from “Would Carly Fiorina Still Support a Muslim President After Seeing This Poll?” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-09-26 02:05:452016-04-11 10:58:00Would Carly Fiorina Still Support a Muslim President After Seeing This Poll?
Well, in truth, these are not so much “fun facts” as they are troubling evidence that Carly Fiorina is yet another establishment plant-cum-loser, one of a series employed by the Republican leadership team to diffuse grassroots support of an outside-the-system candidate like Ted Cruz (or, currently, Donald Trump). With Carly’s rise in the polls, due to two solid debate performances, it’s worth examining her track record to determine whether: (a) could actually win a general election; and (b) she would offer good policy solutions as a commander-in-chief.
The answer on both counts is an obvious “no”. Here’s why:
SHE SUPPORTS OPEN BORDERS AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
In June of this year, Fiorina stated she is open to legal status for adult illegal immigrants and full citizenship for their children. During her Senate run, she endorsed the California DREAM Act, which grants in-state tuition to illegal immigrants. Furthermore, she recently stated that border walls and fences are not effective at protecting U.S. national sovereignty.
WHILE AT HP, SHE WAS IMPLICATED IN A MAJOR IRANIAN TRADE SCANDAL
During her failed run at the Senate, the former HP CEO received plenty of heat about “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of HP printers that were sold to Iran — despite a U.S. ban on trade with that country”. In 2003 Fiorina had described the Middle East as a “growth region” for the company, with its main distributor there doing $100 million in sales that year alone. Fiorina claimed to be unaware of the illegal sales, which begs the question: what competent CEO would be unaware of a nine-figure revenue stream?
WHILE AT LUCENT, SHE WAS BOOKING MASSIVE FRAUDULENT SALES DEALS
Fiorina ran the telecom giant Lucent as it was imploding, a fact that she was able to conceal until after she’d jumped to HP with over $60 million in performance-based pay. A series of major financial sales wins were announced under Fiorina that turned out to be completely fraudulent. In 1999, for example, Fiorina trumpeted a huge sale of up to $2.1 billion of equipment to a company called PathNet. Problem was, however, that PathNet’s annual revenue was $1.6 million and could little afford such a purchase:
In the giant PathNet deal that Fiorina oversaw, Lucent agreed to fund more than 100% of the company’s equipment purchases, meaning the small company would get both Lucent gear at no money down and extra cash to boot. Yet how could such a loan to PathNet make sense for Lucent, even based on the world as it appeared in the heady days of 1999?
It didn’t make any financial sense. Just after Fiorina’s departure, Lucent revealed that it had written $7 billion of loan deals to customers, many of them unviable startups like PathNet, which itself went bankrupt in 2001. Post-Fiorina, Lucent also collapsed as the nature of her vendor-financing deals became obvious; but she walked away with upwards of $60 million.
FIORINA APPEARS ON A VARIETY OF ‘WORST CEOs OF ALL TIME’ LISTS
Her tenures at both Lucent and HP were complete debacles. HP fired Fiorina in 2005 after she led the company’s acquisition of Compaq for $25 billion — just as the conventional PC business began to die. As John Hawkins astutely observed earlier today, her track record led multiple mainstream observers to list her among the worst CEOs of all time (e.g., CBS News, USA Today, CNBC, and ABC News among others).
FIORINA BELIEVES IN MAN-CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING
In a series of interviews from 2008 (when she campaigned for John McCain) to 2010 (when she unsuccessfully ran for the Senate against Barbara Boxer), Fiorina parroted left wing talking points on carbon credits, wind and solar energy sources, and the damage humans are causing to the planet via global warming. As recently as this year, she asserted that climate change is man-made. During her Senate campaign, she also refused to endorse California’s Proposition 23, which would have suspended the economy-destroying AB32 global warming law.
FIORINA IS AN ADMIRER OF THE GENOCIDAL OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Fiorina has issued many admiring comments regarding the Ottoman Empire, which committed the Armenian genocide.
FIORINA OPPOSES FREE SPEECH WHEN IT OFFENDS MUSLIMS
After the Garland, TX terror attack, Fiorina likened Pamela Geller and her group of free speech advocates to “white supremacists demonstrating” and asserted that free speech is “provocative” when it offends Islamists.
FIORINA LOST HER ONLY GENERAL ELECTION… VERY BADLY
Let’s turn again to John Hawkins to wrap things up for on the matter of whether Fiorina would be a credible candidate in the general election:
After beating [conservative Chuck] DeVore [in the GOP primary] by outspending him more than 3-to1, Fiorina went toe-to-toe with charisma-free Senator Barbara Boxer and got her brains beaten in. Surprise, surprise — Fiorina’s disastrous run at Hewlett Packard turned out to be an anchor around her neck and the fact that she was such a terrible politician that she signed off on bizarre garbage like the Demon Sheep ad (IT APPEARS at 2:26) certainly didn’t help. In a year when Republicans picked up 6 Senate seats, Boxer waltzed to a 10 point victory over Fiorina.
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE
In 2010, Erick Erickson offered an excellent summary of Fiorina’s rather bizarre positions including:
Carly’s conservative record was thin to nonexistent, and there were many troubling signs that she held liberal views. From her praise of Jesse Jackson, to her playing the race and gender cards against DeVore, to her support for the Wall Street bailouts, to her qualified support for the Obama stimulus, to her past support for taxation of sales on the Internet, to her waffling on immigration, to her support for Sonia Sotomayor, to her Master’s thesis advocating greater federal control of local education, to her past support for weakening California’s Proposition 13, to her statement to the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board that Roe v. Wade is “a decided issue,” Carly Fiorina’s oft-repeated claim to be a “lifelong conservative” was only plausible in the universe of NRSC staffers who recruited her in the first place.
Executive Summary: there is little reason to believe that Fiorina holds any real conservative views, that she could win a general election, and that she would be a competent chief executive.
I call her “Jeb Bush in a dress”, just another cog in the GOPe machinery designed to sabotage a Cruz or a Trump. (For more from the author of “JEB BUSH in a DRESS: Top 9 Fun Facts About Carly Fiorina” please click HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-09-19 23:16:592015-09-19 23:16:59JEB BUSH in a DRESS: Top 9 Fun Facts About Carly Fiorina
Carly Fiorina, a Republican candidate president and the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, presents herself on the campaign trail as a hawk on Iran. She’s promising to take a hardline on the regime in Tehran.
However, during her time as the chief executive of HP, she “sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of products to Iran through a foreign subsidiary, despite strict U.S. export sanctions,” Bloomberg reports.
While running the show at HP, Fiorina thwarted sanctions by dealing with Iran through European and Middle Eastern companies, allowing for the tech company to dominate the market in Tehran. By 2007, HP-made printers accounted for 41 percent of the total market share in the country, the report states . . .
As Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin writes, HP was engaging in potentially illegal activity, as U.S. companies were prohibited from exporting to Iran thanks to two executive orders signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission started to inquire about HP’s activities overseas following a 2008 Boston Globe exposé that tracked the company’s dealings with Iran. HP responded, denying that it had thwarted the law, but admitting that the company had sold $120 million dollars worth of products to Redington Gulf, which then sent the products to Iran. (Read more from “Fiorina Promised to Be Tough on Iran, but She Didn’t Count on This Ghost From Her Past Being Exposed” HERE)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2015-09-18 23:45:022015-09-18 23:45:02Fiorina Promised to Be Tough on Iran, but She Didn’t Count on This Ghost From Her Past Being Exposed
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina offered her take on the growing controversy of the Kentucky county clerk who is refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses because it violates her religious conscience.
Fiorina spoke on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Thursday saying that religious liberty is clearly under attack but that rights of religious conscience is less clear when an individual is an “arm of the government.”
“First, I think that we must protect religious liberties with great passion and be willing to expend a lot of political capital to do so now because it’s clear religious liberty is under assault in many, many ways,” Fiorina declared.
“Having said that, when you are a government employee, I think you take on a different role,” she added. “When you are a government employee as opposed to say, an employee of another kind of organization, then in essence, you are agreeing to act as an arm of the government” . . .
The former CEO of Hewlett Packard who lost a Senate race to Barbara Boxer in California [and has] previously supported civil unions for same-sex partners as a business leader and Senate candidate. (Read more from “Carly Fiorina: Kentucky Clerk Should Issue Same-Sex Marriage Licenses or Resign” HERE)
