Fiorina absolutely cracked me up.

Unfortunately for the people at Lucent and HP and Compaq, she isn't funny but she did get rich, very very very rich.

Isn't that the point after all? Crack open what you can and suck out the money?

These are EXACTLY the people who are ruining this country. No pride in what one does, and the only reasons for their existances are driving up stock prices or getting massive packages.

Greed.

What do you mean: "The political world is, for a reason I don't fully understand, captivated by some comments Carly Fiorina made today."

Duh! The woman walked away with $40 million after she destroyed HP and 30 thousand people lost their jobs. Now she is McCain's financial adviser.

The media damn well should be tracking this. Over and over and over. It shows that the Republican party is frickin' clueless. Fiorina and McCain don't see why what she did is WRONG in every way possible.

OUT OF TOUCH. The average shareholders vote is meaningless. It is like voting for the Communist Party. Vote what you want, only the majority shareholders (big companies) make the decisions.

Alex are you clueless? This is the real world of the rich Republican leaders, not the world of the thinking, ordinary people. Of course, the religious Republicans don't give a damn about any of it because nothing phases them, Jesus is coming.

He's opposed to structuring them so anyone finds out. Big big difference.

I have a feeling this may be Carly's last appearance on the stump for Grampa Simpson. Her ego totally got in the way, and she couldn't bear to say that either Sarah Freezybuns or Grampa were HER intellectual equal.

Truth is, she was absolutely correct; neither Palin no McCain could run a corporation, any more than they could govern the United States.

Ironic part is Fiorina demonstrated pretty convincingly that SHE wasn't qualified to run a corporation either, as her tenure at the esteemed Hewlett Packard was an unmitigated disaster.

The McCain Campaign: A Confederacy of Dunces.

I'm not remotely going to vote for McCain, and his campaign certainly has said enough stupid and downright false things over the last few weeks to make me certain we shouldn't elect him, but her comments about whether Palin, McCain, Obama and Biden could be CEOs actually are among the more sensible things that have come out of the McCain camp in a while.

Being President and being a CEO are two very different things. There are issues that a CEO thinks about that never cross a President's mind, like employee compensation and responding to competitive threats. By the same token, a President has to figure out how to get his agenda moving forward in Congress, something that's rarely a problem for a CEO unless she's doing a crummy job, and has to consider (well, should consider) moral and ethical issues that largely are off a CEO's radar. They're just very different jobs, which is one reason Ross Perot would have made a lousy President (and probably one of the many reasons that the current President isn't so hot, either).

Now, the point about golden parachutes, that's a good one.

After re-reading your article, I see where you are going. But it wasn't very clear on the first read through. My bad...

He has many of the tools necessary: vision, intellect, curiousity, ability to communicate, drive and ambition. His wife is a VP at University of Chicago Hospital for crying out loud. She also has a BA from Princeton and a Harvard Law Degree. Michelle Obama is more qualified than either McCain or Palin.

And please, let's not lump Obama in with the losers Palin and McCain. McCain was never the sharpest knife in the drawer. He's been sucking on the public teat since the taxpayers paid for him to go to college. He graduated 894 out of 899. McCain has NEVER had a job where his paycheck came from anyone other than Uncle Sam. He's a Dunce.

Palin went to 5 colleges in 6 years - two of them junior colleges - and graduated with a crappy degree in broadcast journalism aka Smile Perty and read the TelePrompter. Case closed.

Obama was a scholarship student at Occidental and Columbia, graduating with a degree in political science and international relations. He then got a Juris Doctorate with honors from Harvard Law School. He could've gone to work for any of a dozen big firms pulling down $3-400,000 starting salary.

Went to Yale and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 2 1/2 years. After being a decorated war hero naval aviator. I will leave the conclusions up to you.

...it seems he is back to his old ways: thinking up new and creative ways to lose a presidential election.

McCain's opposition to golden parachutes and lack of position on how to deal with them is emblematic of McCain's probably ineffectiveness against financial shenanigans. The paradigm that's emerged from the two sides in response to the Lehman/Merrill/AIG meltdowns is that McCain thinks Wall Street is greedy and corrupt, and Obama thinks regulatory mechanisms should be tightened. But McCain offers no solutions to fight greed, because basically there are none. His whole economic/governmental/tax/etc. plan is based on individual responsibility. But governments can't make individuals better. The best they can do is realign incentives to give individuals reasons to act better, i.e. regulate. That's why conservatism is a failure; its inconsistent with pragmatism.

I will certainly have to admit that Carly has the credentials to know about not being able to function as a CEO. She also knows what it takes to tank in other management positions.

She was CFO while I was at Lucent. This was when they had the bright idea to cash out all the employees' pensions and replace them with stock options. At that time Lucent was selling above $90/share, a couple years later, a share of Lucent was selling at approximately $6.

I was only there for 18 mos before I bailed, so no skin off my nose, but I can't help but wonder how all those long-timer Bell Labs and Western Electric people felt watching their pension evaporate.

I suppose it was good for the company not to have the long-term exposure of pensions, but I imagine that she could have found a way to do it without shifting the risk to the backs of the employees.