This is what really got me going:
[Oh, heavens to Murgatroyd, stop the presses, someone actually once said a good thing about the Islamic civilization and fifteen years later someone stirs up a shit-storm. Look who has the big paddle.] -- big hole in ground (it's in China)
Not only that, he's got loads on the Clinton e-mails over there, stuff the Globe and State Department are censoring (more on that after Carly).
So what she said about Iran, worry if Bibi is her good friend and the war rhetoric is real, and now I have an front-page Hit Piece as she comes into her own:
"HP layoffs an issue in Carly Fiorina’s GOP campaign" by Annie Linskey Globe Staff August 18, 2015
WASHINGTON — Republican Carly Fiorina’s candidacy attracts attention in the crowded Republican presidential field for several reasons. Among them: She’s the only woman. She’s the only candidate with experience running a Fortune 50 company.
And given the choice between her or Hillary.... there is no choice.
And she stands out for overseeing mass layoffs — a potential vulnerability as her campaign experiences a summer surge.
Cutting her down before she can grow.
As CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina oversaw 30,000 job cuts from 1999 to 2005, including roughly 200 layoffs in New Hampshire, according to news accounts at the time. The layoffs prompted the federal government to provide emergency grant funds to the Granite State, which holds the nation’s first primary.
Fiorina, in an interview with the Globe, said that layoffs were needed to keep the company competitive and reduce redundancies after a merger with Compaq. Other technology firms shed workers both nationally and in the region from 2003 to 2005, when many of the HP layoffs in New England occurred.
“There is nothing harder than telling someone they don’t have a job any more,” Fiorina said. “I understand why someone who lost their job would be very frustrated and upset.” She said that ex-workers benefited from “the richest severance plans in the industry.”
Not a good way to sell it, but....
Fiorina is enjoying a rise in the polls fueled by her performance in a GOP debate and the way she stood up to GOP contender Donald Trump over what she considered his inappropriate comments about a female Fox News correspondent.
The latest poll in New Hampshire shows Fiorina with 9 percent of the vote, putting her among the top cluster of candidates.
The new attention is prompting a much closer look at her candidacy — and in particular her time at HP. She touts her tenure at the top of the corporate ladder as a qualification to lead the country — while critics of her time there believe it shows the opposite.
Fiorina’s layoffs from that era have some Republicans concerned that, should her candidacy continue to accelerate, she would be vulnerable to the same type of withering criticisms that 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney endured for buying companies at Bain Capital and restructuring them, which sometimes resulted in job losses.
That feeds into the women are discriminated against in the boardroom narrative! Being tougher on her 'cause she's a woman!
She is, of course, not the only candidate known for job reductions. Trump’s signature line from his hit television show “The Apprentice” is “You’re fired!” and he has faced questions about layoffs at some of his sprawling business ventures in the past.
The circus surrounding Trump has drowned out those i$$ues.
The Hewlett-Packard job cuts helped sink Fiorina’s earlier bid for elected office, a 2010 challenge to Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Boxer won by 10 points in part by making the HP cuts a central thrust of her attacks.
Fiorina took over Hewlett-Packard in July 1999 as the company was stalling with a “mandate for radical change,” according to a Harvard Business School paper on her tenure there.
Her mission was to “reinvent HP to lead in the Internet age.”
Her tenure there was criticized by some for poor strategic decisions and causing employee morale to plummet. “Her leadership of HP was a total disaster for the company,” said Michael Beer, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School who has written a book about the firm.
I look at that and say she'd make a good president then. That's the government we have going. Poor decision making with low morale.
When Fiorina took the helm, he said, the company “had problems” but was not in dire straits.
The decision to push a $24 billion merger between Hewlett-Packard and the Houston-based computer maker Compaq focused on selling computers as they were becoming less-expensive commodities.
Fiorina’s campaign disputed the idea that the merger failed, saying that the purpose of the deal was to consolidate various product lines.
“A lot of people misunderstand the HP-Compaq merger,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager. “HP became a one-stop shop.”
At the time, the deal was the largest merger the computer industry had seen. HP shareholders approved it after a fight in March 2002.
Howard Anderson, a venture capitalist and longtime critic of the deal who is now a senior lecturer at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, said in an interview that Fiorina’s effort to turn around HP looks as bad in retrospect as it did at the time.
“They both had fatal flaws,” Anderson said of the two companies.
Each company, he said, thought the other would bring it insights and markets that the other lacked.
After the merger, New Hampshire and Massachusetts were particularly vulnerable to layoffs because Compaq in 1998 had purchased Digital Equipment Corporation, which was once among the region’s largest high-tech employers.
They even used too have offices out here.
On the eve of the merger, Compaq had about 6,500 jobs in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, according to news accounts from the time. HP declined to disclose how many it employed in the region then, but local employees told The Boston Globe at the time that the company employed about 500 in Massachusetts.
HP never reported exactly how many jobs it slashed in the region. The roughly 200 layoffs in New Hampshire are part of the public record because of the federal help the state received and news stories about them.
She hacked you to pieces.
The year after Fiorina left HP, employees in the region continued to lose their jobs. Massachusetts used about $800,000 in state funds to help 266 laid-off HP workers in 2006, according to the state Department of Labor.
She cost us money!
Some of Fiorina’s loudest critics don’t blame her for the New England layoffs, noting that those who had worked for the former Digital Equipment Co. probably would have seen their jobs disappear no matter who was in charge.
“You look at the other wannabe digital companies along Route 128, they suffered the same fate and Carly Fiorina can’t be blamed for that,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the associate dean for Leadership Studies at the Yale School of Management, who has blasted her tenure as CEO.
It's the $y$tem.
Fiorina addressed some concerns about impending layoffs when she came to Boston to meet with industry analysts in June 2002.
“Our salaries are frozen until all employees are entitled to a salary increase,” Fiorina said a conference room at a hotel near Downtown Crossing, according to a news story at the time in the Boston Herald.
That year Fiorina’s compensation was $4.12 million including stock options, according to data from HP proxy sheets compiled by Sonnenfeld who has studied the company for more than three decades.
Hey, the guys do it all the time.
The following year she took a $600,000 pay cut, making $3.5 million. She left HP in February 2005, after earning $102 million in total compensation during her tenure, including a $22 million severance package.
I can see why she liked the packages.
--more--"
Now to the Democratic Pork Chop:
"State Department review of Clinton e-mails flags 305 messages" Associated Press August 18, 2015
WASHINGTON — The State Department review of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mails so far has found as many as 305 messages that could contain classified information and require further review by federal agencies, the department said Monday.
In a court filing that was part of a lawsuit against the State Department, officials told a federal judge in Washington they would be able to meet an existing schedule to release copies of Clinton’s e-mails because only about 5 percent of the messages reviewed so far contain possible secret information that could hold them back for further analysis. The agency said those 305 e-mails with potential classified data were among more than 1,500 documents analyzed so far.
Doesn't sound like much, does it?
The filing came after Clinton said in an Iowa radio interview that during her stint as secretary of state in the Obama administration, she had never sent or received any e-mails on her private server that had information clearly marked classified.
Republican critics have warned that Clinton may have compromised national security by sending and receiving messages that contained secret information, but she has said she followed security guidelines and is the one who made the previously withheld e-mails available to the American public.
And how!
‘‘If I had not asked for my e-mails all to be made public, none of this would have been in the public arena,’’ she said in the interview, recorded last Friday. But the Associated Press and other news organizations had sought copies of Clinton’s e-mails under the US Freedom of Information Act for years.
Yeah, some how she is some sort of angel in all this.
Clinton’s private e-mail server was surrendered to the FBI last week, months after Clinton said it was her personal property and wouldn’t be turned over.
Clinton said in March she had exchanged about 60,000 e-mails during her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were personal and deleted. She turned over the others to the State Department.
Which is scrubbing them for her as well.
--more--"
The Globe's fat and gristle:
"Super PACs rallying women for Hillary Clinton" by Matea Gold Washington Post August 18, 2015
WASHINGTON — Two independent groups allied with Democratic White House contender Hillary Rodham Clinton are teaming up on an ambitious effort to mobilize female voters in support of her, the latest example of how outside organizations financed by wealthy backers are seeking to shape the dynamics of the 2016 race.
Priorities USA Action, the lead super PAC backing Clinton, is working with Emily’s List to raise more than $20 million to reach women in battleground states through paid advertising and other voter outreach.
Is it $oro$ money?
The involvement of Emily’s List will be conducted through Madam President, a project of its independent expenditure arm.
Clinton has endorsed an effort by super PACs allied with her to solicit more major donations to her campaign, to even a disparity with Republican fund-raising. Campaign financial records show that the Republican candidates have a near monopoly on donors of $1 million or more.
What bunch of baloney. Both sides are funded by the $ame intere$ts.
The independent groups also will seek to drive up turnout among female voters — particularly young ones — with a message that the Republican presidential candidates would block access to health care for women and oppose fair pay.
You may not want to draw attention to Planned Parenthood right now.
The 2016 campaign is the first presidential contest in which the number of millennials eligible to vote will match the number of eligible voters from the baby boomer generation.
Except millennials, I'm told, don't show up (mostly because they are homeless) -- or are with Sanders.
‘‘Women voters are the key to winning the 2016 elections, for Hillary Clinton and for Democrats up and down the ballot,’’ Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, said in a statement. ‘‘We are thrilled to be joining forces with Priorities to make sure every woman in this country understands that with a Republican in the White House, our rights, freedoms and opportunities will be on the chopping block.’’
Let the vote machine rigging begin! Got the narrative already in place.
Democratic strategists said the recent remarks by GOP candidates on women’s issues — such as the staunch antiabortion stances by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin— provide an opening to highlight the differences between Clinton and her Republican opponents.
Looks divisive to me. Good thing women are not affected by the wars based on lies or the Wall Street looting based on fraud. No foreclosures for them.
‘‘The entire Republican field is a case study in extremism, and we must fight back against their agenda that would marginalize opportunities for women of every race, age, and economic background,’’ Guy Cecil, cochairman of Priorities USA, said in a statement.
That's a bit extreme, isn't it? I wonder where Carly is on abortion.
One of the top surrogates for Clinton will be former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, who just left the board of Priorities to serve as a senior adviser at Correct the Record, a super PAC that is coordinating with the Clinton campaign on rapid response.
Keep the booze away from her.
The collaboration between Priorities and Emily’s List spotlights how Priorities is positioning itself as the hub in the constellation of independent groups backing Clinton. Earlier this summer, Priorities announced a fund-raising agreement with American Bridge, a group focused on opposition research.
Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s chief rival for the nomination, has gained more financial support than expected but has lagged behind the former secretary of state in building a diverse voting bloc similar to the one that twice elected Obama. Sanders’s message has focused heavily on middle-class economics, climate change, and creating a single-payer health care system.
Related: Sanders Hits a Ceiling
There is your narrative, and I'm not even a fan of the guy. He's got the Warren bloc, but that's not diverse and he has BLM goons sabotaging his campaign when he hews closest to their goals (why do they never interrupt Bush or Clinton commotion?).
--more--"
What I see happening -- if the e-mail scandal is truly is as large as some are suggesting, and there is no reason to doubt it -- is a health issue sidelining the Hillary candidacy (remember the fainting and falls a couple years ago?). That's why Biden has been talked up recently.
I should do more tonight, but really need to stop and get some sleep. Am fired up about getting started in the morning though.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Allowing women to participate in the Ranger course is part of the military’s push to open more combat jobs to women. But the toughest jobs remain closed to female soldiers — including infantry, armor, and special operations positions. That includes the 75th Ranger Regiment, which requires additional schooling that is physically and mentally challenging before soldiers can join. Still, former Army officers such as Sue Fulton, who in 1980 was among the first women to graduate from the US Military Academy at West Point, celebrated the news as another milestone. ‘‘This answers whatever questions may still remain about whether women have the strength, the will, and the physical courage to become combat leaders,’’ Fulton said."
Maybe I'm being sexists, but I was always hoping the ladies might lead the way against war.
Meanwhile, the State Department is concerned with matters other than e-mail.
