Last Call For The Clown Car Contracts

Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina are out.  No surprise there, they finished sixth and seventh, respectively, in New Hampshire last night.

Behind Jeb Bush.

Jeb Bush.

But the smart money still seems to be on Rubio, right Josh Marshall?

In a year when Donald Trump is now the prohibitive favorite to win the Republican nomination, It is likely wise not to rule anything out. But it is also worth noting that in addition to almost certainly ending Marco Rubio's presidential campaign, Chris Christie probably also ended Rubio's political career.

Ouch.

So where next? 

Not the House, not the Senate and clearly not the presidency. He's already been at the pinnacle. It's hard to go back to anything else. The obvious path is to take a few years off and come back to run for Governor as a more seasoned, more mature politician. If that goes well, he's back in business as a national politician, maybe even one better positioned to make a fifty-something run for president. 

Maybe. 

But you usually don't get multiple chances at this - especially if you get marked as a loser. The most likely scenario is that Marco Rubio's career in elective politics is over.

What a difference three years makes, huh.



How's that working out for you, Marco?

Last Call For Ay, Carly! Con't.

Carly Fiorina spoke the most in last night's GOP debate trainwreck into the sun on CNBC, but while much as been made on her misleading attacks on Hillary Clinton, very few people noticed what Ian Millhiser picked up last night: Fiorina is an even better example than Trump of the dire consequences of the false "government must be run like a business" mentality that Republican corporatists espouse.

The minimum wage and Social Security are both unconstitutional, according to Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina — a view that puts her at odds with both longstanding precedents and the text of the Constitution. 

Fiorina revealed her unusual understanding of the nation’s founding text during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential candidates’ debate. In response to a question on whether the federal government should help workers set up retirement plans, Fiorina offered two sweeping declarations about what the nation’s leaders can and cannot do. “There is no Constitutional role for the federal government in setting up retirement plans. There is no Constitutional role for the federal government to be setting minimum wages,” according to the former corporate CEO.

Now Fiorina is held up as some sort of great moderate hope for the GOP that will atract women back to the GOP, but the reality is she admits that she thinks both the minimum wage and Social Security are unconstitutional, and nobody bothered to call her on this.  It's even more depressing when you take a look at her entire response in context to CNBC's Sharon Epperson.

EPPERSON: So you wouldn't agree -- you wouldn't agree with a start for 401(k) for businesses or anything like that? 

FIORINA: I think it's a wonderful that that businesses start a 401(k). The point I'm making is this, the Federal Government should not be in a lot of things. 

There is no Constitutional role for the Federal Government in setting up -- retirement plans. There is no Constitutional role for the Federal Government to be setting minimum wages... 

EPPERSON: Thank you very much. 

FIORINA: ... The more the Government gets engaged in the economy, the slower the economy becomes. The more the Government gets engaged in the economy, it is demonstrably true... 

EPPERSON: Thank you, the rules say one minute. 

FIORINA: ... The more the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected are advantaged. 

EPPERSON: Thank you, Ms. Fiorina. We appreciate it. Thank you, thank you.

Understand that the Fiorina perspective is that it's government regulation that is causing income inequality in America and not corporate greed, which is a bit like saying firefighters (those dastardly government employees that they are and all) are responsible for arsonists.  In fact, the whole "Democrats are socialists" thing gets advanced here to the rampant corruption of Soviet era government officials who exist only to empower oligarchs.

This would be funny if it wasn't primarily Republican lawmakers actually doing this, but Fiorina is arguing that government itself only exists to make the rich richer, and that efforts to stop that only make it worse.

It's arguably the nastiest arrow in the "GOP making sure government oversight can never work" quiver and it's the heart of her campaign.  But understand what Fiorina wants is a world where corporations rule the planet with her at the helm.

Ay, Carly Con't

As I pointed out yesterday, the Right Wing Outrage du Jour is hardcore Islamophobia, and Ben Carson and Donald Trump are sufficiently bigoted for the true GOP base.  But as Steve M. reminds me, Fiorina doesn't sufficiently hate Islam enough to be the GOP nominee.

Anyone who continues to think that the questioner at Trump's rally was a plant meant to embarrass Trump is nuts. Trump thinks this sort of talk wins him votes -- he's had a couple of days to revise and polish his message, so if he thought this was harmful to him, he'd back down, but he's not doing that. And Trump is almost certainly correct in his assessment of Republican voters. Carson also knows that Islamophobia sells to the GOP voter base, so that's what he's delivering.

I don't think Fiorina will be able to keep up.

You probably don't know this, but a lot of people on the right do: A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Fiorina made a speech that praised Islam.

It's a pretty rote speech in hindsight, filled with tech buzzwords and Silicon Valley white knight nonsense about how technology will save "emerging markets", but in the end she tells how Islam made great contributions to the sciences (which is true) and set the world stage for the era of technology we have today (which is also true).

It's possible that Fiorina is done for, certainly, but I doubt it.  If she can keep the subject on her imaginary video of Planned Parenthood dismembering live babies, then she might stay in this after all.

During last week’s Republican presidential debate, Fiorina had claimed that she saw undercover videos from a Planned Parenthood that showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

However, fact checkers like FactCheck.org and The Washington Post have said that there was no such scene included in the videos that were recently released by an anti-abortion group.

“Do you acknowledge what every fact checker has found?” Fox News host Chris Wallace asked the candidate on Sunday. “As horrific as the scene is, it was only described on the video by someone who claimed to have seen it. There is no actual footage of the incident you just mentioned.”

“No, I don’t accept that at all,” Fiorina shot back. “I’ve seen the footage. And I find it amazing, actually, that all these supposed fact checkers in the mainstream media claim this doesn’t exist, they’re trying to attack the authenticity of the videotape, I haven’t found anyone in the mainstream media who has ever watched these things.”

“I mean, they will claim that somebody watched it for them,” she continued. “I will continue to dare anyone who wants to continue to defund Planned Parenthood, watch the videotapes.”

“And anyone who wants to challenge me first is going to have to prove to me that they watched it.”

This is a perfect argument for her, because she can't lose it.  Anyone who challenges her on this, she will say "You didn't watch the videos, I did, you're lying."  She's basically calling the media liars, and that's a winning hand every time among the GOP faithful.  No Republican is going to challenge her position on this.  No media will challenge her on this.  As long as she can ride this, she stays in the game.

As long as she gets to frame Planned Parenthood as "who do you trust, me or the lamestream media?" she cannot lose, period.  I don't know if it's good enough to get her the nomination, but it's she's going to ride this train as long as she can.  Sarah Palin showed the way 7 years ago.

Watch.

Failing The Test

Ben Carson should probably read the Constitution once in a while, or at least the parts that aren't the Second Amendment.

Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson said he would not support a Muslim as President of the United States.

Responding to a question on "Meet the Press," the retired neurosurgeon said, "I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that."

He also said that Islam, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution.

Carson, who is near the top of several early presidential polls, said a president's faith should matter depending on what that faith is. "If it's inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter," he clarified.

Meanwhile, the three GOP candidates who have never held public office now have 53%, a pretty solid majority, of the GOP primary vote.

Carly Fiorina has rocketed into second place in the Republican presidential field on the heels another strong debate and Donald Trump has lost some support, a new national CNN/ORC poll shows.

The survey, conducted the three days after 23 million people tuned in to Wednesday night's GOP debate on CNN, shows that Trump is still the party's front-runner with 24% support. That, though, is an 8 percentage point decrease from earlier in the month when a similar poll had him at 32%.

Fiorina ranks second with 15% support -- up from 3% in early September. She's just ahead of Ben Carson's 14%, though Carson's support has also declined from 19% in the previous poll.

There's a reason none of these three have ever won an election, I'm thinking.

Ay, Carly, Con't

Carly Fiorina supposedly "won" Wednesday night's CNN debate, which is a bit like being named Best Orc in Mordor.  Her answers to questions included things like this:

Each candidate was asked who he or she would put on the $10 bill. President Obama's administration announced that a woman would appear on the $10 bill, currently the note of Alexander Hamilton. 

"I wouldn't change the $10 bill or the $20 bill. I think honestly it's a gesture. Don't think it helps to change our history. What I would think is we ought to recognize that women are not a special interest group," Fiorina said. "Women are the majority of this nation. We are half the potential of this nation. And this nation will be better off when every woman has the opportunity to live the life she chooses."

That's a nice sentiment.  Too bad that Fiorina wants to take a number of choices away from women involving their own bodies, their careers, and their families, and has to lie about it in order to try to get there, as Vox's Sarah Kliff points out.

Carly Fiorina defended her remarks about Planned Parenthood Thursday morning on Good Morning America. 

"There's a lot of commentary about these tapes being doctored," Fiorina said in an interview with George Stephanolous. "In fact,that's what the mainstream media keeps talking about is the tapes and their origin. Rest assured, I have seen the images I talked about last night. Rest assure, human lives are being harvested."

Except that's not the case.

There are two Planned Parenthood sting videos that were shot inside Planned Parenthood clinics (other videos exist, taped at conferences and lunch meetings). One was taped in Louisiana and the other in Colorado. And in both videos, Planned Parenthood employees do work with the fetal tissue, showing the pro-life advocates posing as tissue buyers the different parts of the body. 

But the things Fiorina describes — the legs kicking, the intact "fully formed fetus," the heart beating, the remarks about having to "harvest its brain" — are pure fiction.

It's very interesting how Fiorina talks about women being half the potential in this country, and in a field of 15 candidates, she's the only woman.

Ay, Carly!

There's been more than a little talk about how Carly Fiorina "won" the FOX News second-stringer debate and has established herself in the Pack Of People Only Somewhat Behind Trump, based on her intelligence and business record. But as NYT Dealbook reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin reminds us, Fiorina's business record is her main reason for disqualification.

For much of this early campaign season, in the crowded field of Republican candidates, Mrs. Fiorina didn’t look as if she had much of a chance at the White House. But recently, in the afterglow of her impressive performance in the first Republican debate, Mrs. Fiorina has begun to make significant gains in the polls that have made her a more formidable candidate. She has attracted attention for her sharply articulated pro-market policies and broadsides against both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald J. Trump. 

And so it is curious to those of us who have reported on her business career that there has not been a greater focus in recent days on her “track records and accomplishments,” as she suggested she should be measured by. 

Even more striking, Mrs. Fiorina, the only former female chief executive among the candidates, continues to promote her business experience on the trail, yet she was fired by Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock dropped by half in 2005. She has long blamed her failings at running the technology giant on the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the deepening recession in Silicon Valley after the Sept. 11 attacks. 

In an essay published late last week, Mrs. Fiorina also said she lost her job because of her maverick management style. “When you lead and when you challenge the status quo, you make enemies,” she wrote in the essay published on CNN’s website. “It’s why Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney and Mike Bloomberg have all been fired.” 

While those four business icons all received pink slips at some point in their careers (as a young man, Mr. Disney was fired from a Missouri newspaper for lacking imagination), none presided over such a sharp decline in one of America’s great companies. 

“Experience can be a badge of honor or a badge of shame,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, who wrote a recent essay about Mrs. Fiorina’s travails. In an interview, he compared Mrs. Fiorina to the captain who caused the shipwreck of Carnival’s Costa Concordia in 2012. “He will never be trusted with a public leadership role. Captains of industry must also be accountable.” 

In September of 2001, I remember sitting in a theater in midtown Manhattan, listening raptly as Mrs. Fiorina announced Hewlett-Packard’s merger with Compaq and boasted about the combined company’s prospects. 

“Hang with us,” she said on that same day in a conference call with reporters. “It’s going to be a great party.” 

The party never happened, but the hangover was brutal. Hewlett-Packard is still recovering from the ill-conceived merger nearly 15 years later, and recently decided to split the company up. There were some 30,000 layoffs. Its stock price plunged and badly lagged its competition.

There's a reason why Fiorina got her clock cleaned by Barbara Boxer by ten points in 2010's California Senate race in a year where Republicans made record gains elsewhere.  She's a terrible candidate across the board, and I frankly have no idea why she's running,  She basically destroyed Hewlett-Packard and her record as CEO alone should have even Republicans recall the antics of the last terrible CEO in the Oval Office, one George W. Bush.

Fiorina's an also-ran and isn't going anywhere.  Besides, Republicans have a MUCH bigger problem in Donald Trump right now.  A new CNN poll this morning still shows Hillary Clinton easily beating all contenders. Oh, and the Republican candidate that she would have the largest margin of victory against?

Carly Fiorina, by ten points.  Fiorina's faring even worse in the general election than Trump is against Clinton.

But please, keep banging that drum, kids.

Last Call For Carly Fail-O-Rama

So, guess which GOP 2016 hopeful and former HP CEO failed to register carlyfiorina.org?

This goes on for a while.

A loooooooong while.

Finally, at the bottom:

Why no, Carly Fiorina is not going to be President of the United States anytime soon, especially after getting paid $42 million to lay off those 30,000 people when that didn't fix HP's problems.

Hooray for wealth redistribution I guess if she's going to spend those millions maybe getting one or two percent of the GOP primary vote.